


The Three Stages.

by MadamMortis



Series: The Three Stages [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Bottom Crowley (Good Omens), Canon Compliant, Character Death, Dialogue Heavy, Explicit Sexual Content, Flashbacks, Flirting, Friends to Lovers, Gallows Humor, LGBTQ Themes, M/M, Major Character Injury, Original Character(s), Other, Plot, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Season/Series, Romance, Romantic Soulmates, Slow Burn, Spoilers, Top Aziraphale (Good Omens), Violence, War, longfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2020-06-25 21:18:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 59
Words: 395,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19754005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadamMortis/pseuds/MadamMortis
Summary: It has been six months since the would be War to End everything. Aziraphale and Crowley, dishonourably discharged from their respective offices, have since settled back into their cosy routines on earth. With the winds of change however, come the so far unspoken questions. What manner of life awaits? Are they free at last to truly be together? What form does this being ‘together’ take? And what the bloody hell does winebibber mean?Important questions, to be certain. But the end of the world is not something to be delayed by an otherwise minor inconvenience. God’s Ineffable Plan is about to be enacted and the storm what approaches leaves the forces of both Heaven and Hell out in the cold. Their last hope rests, ironically and begrudgingly, with the likes of two redundant and wholly substandard former employees; An angel and a demon that are far more concerned with sorting out their relationship and buckling down for that next glass of wine than dealing with preternatural politics.Armageddon is geared for a do-over. A Hell of a time to be taking things to the next level.





	1. Or, where Crowley gets addicted to hugging And Aziraphale pays the price.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was no great art to human possession. But to possess an angel... ah. There was a challenge in and of itself. One he had yet to see bear fruit (most ironically) in over six thousand years...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Clearly I do not own Good Omens. I am writing a fanfic. I have become part of the Good Omens hoarde. If anything, Good Omens currently owns me.
> 
> A/N: As a result of my sub-dividing the original content, please be advised that the comments section may contain spoilers for future chapters :)
> 
> As a person deeply fascinated and compelled by character relationships, particularly those that are a little more non-traditional, I found myself absolutely blown away by the crackling chemistry between the characters of Aziraphale and Crowley. (A great deal of credit goes of course to Michael Sheen and David Tennant for their brilliant portrayals. Holy shit boy, you blow that blue paint off of your boo's jacket. ... Did not mean for that to actually sound dirty).
> 
> Do I view the relationship between the characters as being romantic? Absolutely and unequivocally. I think the changing of the tides in Good Omens would open up some new doors of possibility and that is what I wanted to explore; the fact that great love can certainly exist in a relationship between two individuals that potentially defies definition. And also, you know... instigating a brand new Arma-Getter-DONE!
> 
> And so, after much ado about nothing; my first chapter! It sets a bit more of a light-hearted tone than the later chapters, which are a bit more serious but I hope that you enjoy all the same :)

**~X~**

* * *

The Catholic Church would have you believe that there are three stages to demonic possession.

These are, as follows:

Infestation, Oppression and last, but certainly not least, Possession.

The reason that there are three, is because the Church is of the opinion that the number three is used by demons to mock the Holy Trinity. Whether this is true or not, I can't say. What I can say, with some certainty, is that when making a list, three is quite definitely a stronger number than two and yet not quite so as demanding with its expectations as is five. This isn't a list of New Years resolutions swiftly forgotten by the 2nd of January, after all.

The first stage of possession, _Infestation_ , is all about the demon driving a hot nail into your soft spot. The knocking, the tapping, the image of the little girl or the message on the Ouija board from 'Grandma So-and-so' trying to tell you both who killed her and where she hid the inheritance money. Of course, someone in the group is invariably likely to be pushing the planchette; which is probably a good thing, considering the mischief actual demons have caused whence taking control of a séance themselves.

It may not end up with pea-soup and three-hundred and sixty degree spinal rotations but on one particular drunken night in Enfield, Crowley did vaguely remember causing a girl to levitate, speak in all manner of tongues and manifesting then as a crotchety old man who may or may not have lived in a particular house on Green street.

The reason for this malignant lashing out was because the poor girl had done nothing other than accidentally smack her bag into the passenger side door of his Bentley when she had been running to catch the bus. It had left the slightest, near imperceivable to the naked eye, infinitesimal scratch but this was more than enough to incite in Crowley a rage comparable only to that of waking up during the night and stubbing your toe on something whilst trying to get to the bathroom.

The fact that he could miracle it away with a mere brush of his finger was irrelevant. A lesson needed to be taught and on this occasion he was the one holding the pointer stick.

Aziraphale (having been the one to quite literally drag a drunken Crowley kicking and screaming away from 284 Green Street) had not been at all amused by the matter. It had interfered with his supper for one. Crowley (once sufficiently sobered up and satiated with some calmative tablet Aziraphale had all but crammed down his throat) had been quick to leap to his own defence; citing the media attention was only likely to benefit the family in the long run, so no real harm done (more's the pity) and everyone got on with their lives. As it was, the reticent cycle of that drunken evening out was set to line the pockets of some very savvy film producers many years down the track. If only a demon could claim creative licensing and take a modest chunk of the resultant proceeds, but there you have it. Theirs was a thankless work.

The second stage, _Oppression,_ was typically considered to be when folks started acting out. Verbalizing, screaming and hissing, thrashing, levitating, hurting themselves and others. Generally thought to be a battle between the mind of the invading demon and the mind of the host body.

An assumption that did truly annoy Crowley, for he was not an unsympathetic demon and he rather felt that far too much time had been spent throughout the ages treating such symptoms as demonic possession when it was in fact a humans mental health condition that was the true demon. Perhaps if humans had spent half as much time helping one another as they did with persecuting each another, they might very well have created the metaphorical 'Cure-all' pill and spared their entire race a great deal of grief.

The third stage, and the only one which held even a grain of truth, was _Possession_ itself. For all the 'evidence' that might suggest otherwise, Crowley and any one of his much begrudged 'brethren' need only put about as much effort into possessing a human, as was required to place a spoonful of sugar into a cup of coffee. They could dissolve between the individual chromosomes, pair to them, encompass them and instil themselves as readily and as completely as sugar becomes one with the water and the coffee beans.

There was no great art to human possession. But to possess an angel... _ah_. There was a challenge in and of itself. One he had yet to see bear fruit (most ironically) in over six thousand years.

* * *

He had known in the garden that this angel was different. He was far more stupid, for one. (Gave away a flaming sword... honestly...) But stupid in that 'Constantly in need of affirmation, never asked questions, never challenged, got a bluebird shoved up an inopportune crevice' sort of way that was as much endearing to Crowley as he was certain the angels of Heaven found it to be positively infuriating.

Aziraphale was, by Crowley's somewhat biased estimations, quite the very best thing that had ever come out of the Celestial realm. As sweet as he himself was sour but every bit as clever, with a sharp wit that often times stole out ahead of his inherit predilection of bandying good cheer at every turn.

In the days of the Garden he had been of a rather sturdy, muscular frame, though this had quickly changed as Earth had taken to producing more and more delectable food stuffs and Aziraphale had, without much prompting mind, surrendered to the temptation of the plate and started determinedly filling out.

Crowley thought his softness rather pleasant. It paired well to his personality and served as an appropriate foil to Crowley's own body; tall, lean and with a lanky propensity that invariably brought to mind a spider that had been dropped onto a hotplate. (This had been quite literally tested in the forties, when he had minced his way into a Church, feet just about set to fire from the consecrated ground, just so as to rescue Aziraphale from yet another stupid situation that the well meaning idiot had landed himself in).

They had a lovely rapport from the beginning. Quite natural, if he were to be honest. He supposed this was, in part, because he was not particularly that good of a demon. (Or that... _bad_ of a demon, rather). And Aziraphale was, most certainly, not the most proficient of a principality. They both loved earth a little too much and quite definitely liked each other far more than what was considered proper for an Angel and a Demon. (Though they much rather preferred to hide it where possible.)

They had been friends now for over six thousand years. Field agents of their respective domains; charged with the eternal task of sowing peace and dissent on earth. (And trading up wherever possible, as per the 'Arrangement'.) The dynamic worked ever so fluently because when a pair such as they were to meet smack in the middle, they created something of an unintended (and then rather _intended)_ balance.

A balance that was quite readily achieved because neither had to regress terribly far before they drew even. Need I remind you; that this was not a pair of especially _competent_ Angels and Demons. Just two who really rather wanted to simply crack on with the cracking on, have a glass of wine and leave the intricacies of politics to other far more qualified preternatural beings. What interest was it of theirs when there was a particularly lovely _Cheval Blanc_ that required imbibing? They could handle that. Everyone else could handle... the everything else.

And now, following a rather ham-handed and rather 'unlovely' Armageddon (or Armage-Don't-even-bother, as Crowley had taken to calling it) the pair had effectively severed their bonds with their affiliated agencies and were now subsequently left to their own devices.

It had given Anthony J. Crowley (What _does_ the J stand for?) plenty of time to indulge in an activity that he was most definitely certain he could have used much less of in his retirement. _Thinking_. A dangerous pastime and one which, for all his efforts, he couldn't seem to curb, no matter how obstinate and dualistically creative his imagination.

He spent an inordinate amount of time those first few weeks following the Armage-Don't-even-bother, watching Aziraphale congenially masticate whatever reportedly 'scrumptious' morsel had been served him, wiping crumbs and cream alike from his cherubic little face and penned to his internal memoir that This Was _It_.

'This' was to be his eternity, going at a slow saunter about the globe and likely visiting every known restaurant on the face of the earth with a positive enough review on Yelp and waiting an hour and a half for Aziraphale to finish eating his entrée just so as they could transgress onto the next course.

Did such a prospect aggrieve him though? Hardly. He enjoyed the world. And he enjoyed his dear friend far more than the world itself, and would have sat and watched him eat cake on any desolate wind scorched little moon off in the farthest reaches of the farthest nebula. (Well, it would probably have been moon rocks but the sentiment would have still been the same).

He was content. And yet... the demon could not quite shake the feeling that... something was decidedly... off balance.

* * *

It all started to make a little more sense one temperate enough Wednesday afternoon, when Crowley and Aziraphale were idling (or rather selectively sauntering and tottering) down to sample the delights of a wine bar they had grown particularly fond of, when a gathering of humans donned in threateningly coloured tie-dye t-shirts caught their attention.

One of their gathering, a young woman, gestured for them to approach, her smile as white and as warm and as congenial as any one of those strange people that might bounce into the workplace and announce their presence with a bubbly ' _Boy, I do love cycling to work_!' as frost condensates and drips from their helmet.

"Sir, we're giving out free hugs as part of our Mental Health Awareness week! Would you like a hug?" She asked, her arms extended towards Aziraphale but her eyes glancing surreptitiously towards a 'Could-hardly-care-less' Crowley.

Aziraphale, naturally, looked all too delighted to participate in anything that promoted the rotting of several otherwise perfectly functional back molars.

"Oh, well. A free hug sounds quite marvellous, my dear!" Aziraphale enthused, with a smile so dazzling that Crowley was surprised most people didn't instinctually shield their eyes whilst caught in the grip of it. He held out his arms and the young lady stepped into his embrace. Aziraphale was one of the few... beings Crowley knew, who could have such an interaction with a young woman and leave nothing in the least to be inferred from it. He had all the jolly verve, appropriate aplomb and, for lack of a better term, sexless charm of a bleach blonde Santa Claus.

She was well having a lend of herself however, if she thought Crowley would be in any way receptive to the offer. When the young lady extended her arms to him and asked ' _And what about you?_ ', it took every ounce of the demon's self-control not to hiss at her.

"I'm all good for hugs. _Thanks_." He managed instead, giving her a toothy smile that was likely quite as dark as Aziraphale's had been warm. It was the sort of smile a person might remark had 'not quite reached the person's eyes' but there really wasn't any means of accurately determining this, as Crowley was wearing, as he always did, his dark, uniquely stylized sunglasses.

If the young lady were to get a proper glimpse of his actual eyes; large, tropical frog yellow and splintered by a thick black vertical gash, she might not have been so eager to be on the receiving end of a hug from him after all.

"I think you rather disappointed that young lady today." Aziraphale was heard to be remarking later, passing over a snifter of brandy into Crowley's waiting hand. The demon sniffed the meagre offering, wrinkled his nose at its modest volume and immediately looked about for the bottle so as to correct the oversight.

They had returned to Aziraphale's book shop following dinner. A book shop that served, more accurately, as a place in which Aziraphale stored his millennia old's collection of rare books. Books of which he had no intention of ever relenting into the custody of anyone else.

A bookshop was as good a front as any, but the constant risk of customers coming in and actually attempting to purchase any of the tomes from his collection was ever so wearing, and Aziraphale enforced any number of preternatural deterrence's as a means of preventing it.

From convoluted and near indecipherable opening times to foul odours which seemed to emanate from nowhere, an inability to find from amongst the mess the exact book that you wanted and a much practiced but hardly perfected patented glare (which Crowley had invested the better half of a century attempting to teach him) were just some of the methods Aziraphale had in his celestial arsenal to keep would be customers at bay. It was not always effective, as there were the select few in human society that were either uncaring, inhibitive when so far as the five senses were concerned, inexorably patient and then there were those masochistic types who seemed to revel in diving in and out of uncategorized books such as a dolphin rides the rip tow of a ship that might at any second attempt to harpoon it.

"What young lady?" Crowley remarked, which was quite what Aziraphale expected, given how dottery the demon appeared to be getting as of late. He found himself, more often than not, having to repeat things the once or twice before they seemed to sink in. If they ever saw fit to sink in at all. Perhaps he was falling victim to some manner of demonic dementia?

"You know who. The peppy one at that awareness gathering, or whatever you might call it. Bad t-shirt." Aziraphale settled into his study chair, chancing Crowley with an affectionate glance before drawing in on the fumes from his drink. He sighed with a connoisseur's appreciation. "I think she was rather keen to have a hug with you."

This was quite lost on Crowley, who, having now rectified the well rather wanting state of his drink, lowered the tides once more by taking a sip of it and dropped onto the lounge settee with about as much grace as espoused by a mortally wounded walrus.

"Why?" He asked, more for the sake of continuing the conversation than for actual want of an answer. Quite honestly, for all his griping, he could have sat and debated with Aziraphale about the definition of every word in the dictionary and still call it a productive evening.

"Well, I should think it quite obvious. You are a rather handsome chap." Aziraphale said smilingly and to which he received an unconcerned ' _Pfft'_ in return. Crowley really had little to no concern as to how his earthly body was received. He kept with the times, so as to blend in and found some enjoyment in putting his best metaphorical foot forward but he certainly didn't sit around wringing his hands over it. The body served its purpose and far better than most of those of his Hell based kin, _that_ was for sure. A set of yellow eyes was far easier to conceal than a symbiotic _toad_.

As for 'handsome'... eh, how was he to know? Human interpretations of attractiveness were constantly in flux. They were a fickle species, which never seemed satisfied with what it had.

"I seem to recall a particular era in Rome when a certain white-haired Angel was all the rage..." Crowley drawled, taking off his glasses and rubbing his thumbs into the corners of his eyes. He'd grown accustomed to wearing them throughout the millennia he'd spent on Earth but it still didn't make his eyes feel any less tired in the evening. Aziraphale actually blushed at this one.

"Oh, that _was_ a dreadfully awkward time. People always fluttering about, asking questions."

"Upskirting you."

"I was ever so grateful for the invention of pantaloons." Aziraphale took a sip from his drink, his eyes just about sparkling with their amusement. Crowley watched, quite aware, as he always was, that his own eyes would never again possess such virtuous warmth.

Once he might have felt resentful for it. Now, well... now he simply liked to admire them. He supposed really that no one's eyes could quite compare to the natural kindness of Aziraphale's; an angel with a disposition so sweet that it made others of his ilk looking positively lemony by comparison.

"The look on your face..." Aziraphale was saying, leaning back in his chair and resting his drink on the rise of his round stomach. Crowley gave himself a mental shake, bringing his attention staunchly back to reality. "Why, you looked as though the girl was about to go and splash Holy Water in your eyes!"

"Well I didn't want to hug her." Crowley flatly stated, giving that tell-tale hike of his nostrils which said that he found something distasteful. "If I wanted something overly saccharine and pip-pip ‘when life gives you lemons make lemonade’ little do-gooder pressing themselves up on me, I'd rather make do with you. Least I know where you've been."

Aziraphale didn't quite seem to know what to make of this. "Well, if you ask me, it just seems to be something of a wasted opportunity. I can't imagine you have had the chance for many hugs since the Fall."

Crowley could scarcely bring himself to even pretend to care about this one. "No. Not really. My lot aren't exactly known for their warm and fuzzy disposition. And there haven't been any humans I've liked enough to curl up with." He stared with mounting suspicion at his old friend, feeling each muscle in his body coil reflexively in preparation for... What, he wasn't quite sure. It was as though he were gearing up for an attack, but there was never a need to be on point when it came to Aziraphale. "Why are you acting like this is such a big deal, angel? I'm sure the girl enjoyed hugging you much more than she would have enjoyed hugging me. You're all round and podgy. You've got those..." He jiggled his glass free hand at his side. "-love handle things for extra cushioning. And here's me with bones sticking out every which way. All elbows and knees and double joints, me."

Aziraphale allowed this backhanded near compliment to sail on by without affixing itself to his self-esteem. Something of which only an angel was capable, truly. "It just... well, let's just say that it explains so much."

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"You've clearly been deprived of touch, my dear!" Aziraphale exclaimed, rising from his seat and setting down his near depleted glass with a burst of energy most would consider highly offensive for that time of the evening. "And touch is an integral and vital component of the corporeal experience. It assists the brain in releasing dopamine; the chemical responsible for improving mood and-" He ceased in his lecture, taking Crowley's indefinitely grumpy façade as proof enough. "- well, I should think it quite plain that your dopamine levels have barely given a metaphorical twitch of their ears in some time."

Crowley, as a demon, seemed to have a built in combative gene that simply would not allow him to sit idly by without protesting whatever otherwise enforced statement might be levelled at him. Now, was no exception. "Oh, I see. So, when you were _up there_ , flapping about in your Heavenly Mother of Pearl towers of eternal glory, all you angels were just...? What? Grabbing on like a bunch of winged barnacles and hugging the holy shit out of each other? You and Gabriel locked in a big old love knot, twirling around in the Celestial void, playing grab arse while _The Sound of Music_ soundtrack blasts in the background?"

Aziraphale glanced nervously about at this, as though the choirs of Heaven still remained privy to their conversations. Which would quite honestly be a glowing indictment as to just how collectively bored the angels of Heaven were, if these were the sorts of exchanges they thought worth listening in on. "I should hardly think so! Gabriel's not in the _least_ interested in the sharing of an embrace. He made that quite clear the last time that I tried."

"To what? Grab him on the arse?"

"To give him a _hug_ , you idiot! I thought it might have been a nice team bonding exercise. But then he just called me stupid and took my cocoa away." Aziraphale twisted his lip ever so slightly. " _Cupid_ on the other hand, well! He was much too eager, even for my tastes."

"I remember Cupid." Crowley mused, eyes cast aside so that he did not bear witness to the look of intense shock coupled with curiosity that stole place of purchase on Aziraphale's face. "He did like to hug. Way too much. Tried more than hugging as well, more than one occasion."

"You remember Cupid?" Aziraphale said meaningfully. He looked to Crowley with a reverence that seemed to suggest that the demon's wings had sprung into being and turned back to majestic (and subsequently ungroomed) white. "Well... I remember Cupid from... way back. Different departments of course. He was ever so forthright with his affections." He looked spellbound a moment, lost in his feelings and contemplations. "You and I... we might very well have crossed paths... In the... the old days."

"Uh-huh." Crowley grunted, turning his lips back to perch upon the rim of his glass. All the better for Aziraphale to not witness the smirk that stole precedence over them. "Couple of times. You just don't remember."

"Oh no, come on! You can't do that!" Aziraphale all but erupted and it took every ounce of self control Crowley had to not burst out laughing. His irritation could be just as charming as his naivety. "When are you ever going to tell me who you were back when you were in Heaven?"

"It's not who I am any more, so what does it matter?" Crowley replied, which he felt was as fair a point as any. "The agreement stands. You figure it out on your own, you feel the need to know. I'm not spending any more of my time lamenting the past. Anything that drives us further into the future is all the better in my books." He held up a cautionary finger. "Not actual books, mind you, angel. Don't read books. Get bored by books. Big, fat, bloody books... Full of big stupid, bloody words. Like _winebibber_. I mean, what pretentious little git came up with something like _winebibber_ , ya reckon?"

"Well, that being said, I would like to relegate the postulations concerning _winebibber_ to whence we next meet and finalize first our earlier conversation, if you please. And I, in turn, am pleased to report that during my time on earth, I have been the recipient of any number of hugs from some of the more grateful humans I crossed paths with." Aziraphale proudly stated, flopping back down into his chair with slightly less decorum than he had previously demonstrated. He poured himself another brandy and might have offered more to Crowley if the latter had not already helped himself.

"Uh-huh,” The demon responded, not caring. He was tired and ornery; none of which was out of the norm, simply that he had very little interest in the conversation it appeared Aziraphale was more the insistent on having. He was still too strung up over _winebibber_ and was raking through the collective nodes of his brain for a time in history when the word first might have raised its nascent little head. Got to have been a Shakespeare thing. He was just the sort of gnarly, pompous little knob to have come up with something like that...

"Look, you are just a little out of practice." The angel was suddenly back on his feet, glass left behind in his enthusiastic wake and he was moving a footstool across to the far side of the room. He returned and stood at an approximate swinging distance from the couch, smiling in a both encouraging (and slightly off-putting) manner, gesturing towards his chest with his hands. "Come, come."

Crowley, feeling cold steel make a home for itself in his belly, sat up on the couch and slinked apprehensively over its far arm and moved about half a rooms length away, his eyes darting towards all available exits. Unlike Aziraphale he kept a firm hold of his drink. Mainly, because it was a bloody good year but secondarily, because he felt as though he would very soon have need of it.

"What are you doing? Why has the stool being moved out of kicking distance?"

"Because you need a hug." Aziraphale said, with such a cultish, Kumbaya, ' _Please-buy-our-girl-guide cookies_ ' insistence to his tone that Crowley felt the overwhelming urge to disappear once more into his phone and save himself.

"I don't need a hug. Who said I needed a hug?"

"That sour 'I have been sucking on a lemon for the past six thousand years' expression that you've been wearing for the past... six thousand years, says so. Now come on, there's nothing to be afraid of." He fluttered his fingers at the plaintively frightened demon, grinning in a way he thought to be comforting, but from Crowley's alarmed perception, looked all too maniacal and slightly bloodthirsty. "It's nice. You'll enjoy it."

"Well, you do look soft." Crowley acquiesced, which was another near insult Aziraphale did his utmost to wear gracefully. "But, I uh... I don't..." The demon shook his head, fighting some internal battle with much the same external motions he might have made if a blowfly had taken up residence in his skull. "I don't really think we need to be ...hugging. I mean, what's in it for you?"

The inference that an Angel might have some degree of self-interest was plainly an offensive one so far as Aziraphale was concerned. "I've already told you, nothing! I just thought you might like one!"

Crowley, still untrusting, weighed up all the categorical gains and gain-nots of the situation and still couldn't seem to quite work out the maths. "I... I don't know..."

"Is it really going to kill you to give something new a try? We have all the time in the world, for... someone's sake." It was their go to now, since the shucking of their respective domains. It was hard to know who or 'what' to thank, if anything once you had lost faith in all known corners of the universe. "If we're going to keep from getting bored, we must do our best to experience new things."

Crowley felt a flush of pure pleasure at this, something that might only be achieved in knowing that he was about to catch his old friend out in a raging contradiction. If there were sweeter fruit than getting one up on the people you cared about, he had yet to try it. "Oh... really? Because I seem to recall _someone_ turning down that antique car show I wanted to go to because _it wasn't a catered event_!" He snapped snakishly, pouting his lips then to form an expression which plainly read ' _Try wriggling out of that one gracefully_ '.

Aziraphale, however, was far more on point than Crowley was these days and had quite sufficient experience wriggling in any number of ways. "Shows how reliable _your_ memory is, for I did attend that insufferable little automobile show, thank you kindly! I packed a picnic and brought my own wine and a lovely duck parfait. You remember. We had scones."

All the blood drained from Crowley's face. Oh dear...whoever. They did go to the car show. With a picnic hamper. Aziraphale had brought a red and white checked blanket and two matching cushions and those wine glasses you can push into the dirt. There had been quite a bit of laughter, most of which Crowley was sure only he had been aware of and none of which the either of them had shared in.

"Oh, right. _Knew_ there was a reason I blocked that one out..."

"So, if you are to insist on us continuing to keep tabs, it would seem, dear fellow that it is _your_ turn, to step outside of your comfort zone."

"Oh, believe me." Crowley said, staring humourlessly from beneath his brows as the memories of that particular outing continued to flood back with a cringe-ful vengeance. "That picnic at the car show was _very much_ out of my comfort zone."

Aziraphale gave him one of those looks; one that Crowley, well versed as he was in the art of manipulation, could rarely negotiate with any confidence. Which said a lot as to how effective it was. "Very well. I'm hardly going to force it on you." He smiled that ever so beautiful and ever so infuriating smile. "I understand that you're afraid."

"Oh, I'm not afraid. I'm also not stupid enough to fall for blatant reverse psychology, angel." Crowley took a haughty hit from his glass and crossed the room, carefully, mind you, to pour himself another round. Aziraphale, doing that ever so hateful all-knowing look which seemed a veritable staple of an angel's personality (or sometimes lack, thereof) placed his fingertips together to form a passive steeple shape. His eyes, framed with their soft, long lashes, veritably danced above it.

"Crowley, my dear, I am in no position to judge you."

"Hey, if you want a hug so bad, you could just ask." Crowley said, turning the injurious accusation back on its angelic instigator. "Instead of all this trying to convince me that I secretly want some sort of weird dopamine ejaculatory emission."

"I am not so proud as to object to sharing an embrace with my oldest and dearest friend." Was Aziraphale's smooth and somehow equally humbling response. It made Crowley feel, just as was surely intended, somehow ungracious and childish. As though he considered himself _too good_ to cuddle it up with his dear friend; which was entirely untrue. If there was one thing Crowley knew to be true it was that he was _never_ too good for _anything_.

"... fine, then." He relented, going to put his drink down and then thinking better of it. "One moment." He refilled the glass, downing the contents in one motion so fluid that Aziraphale did not even see his Adams apple flex as the alcohol sailed past it. There was a tiny amount remaining in the base and Crowley might very well have left it there, if not for having noticed it last minute and slogging back the lingering drop with a somehow indecent swish of his tongue. Only now did he place the empty glass down, wipe his mouth on his sleeve and take a deep breath in through his nose. As though he were a boxer preparing himself for the ring. "Okay. So... How do we do this?" He sniffed.

"Oh, well. It's quite simple really." Aziraphale said, smiling supportively as he extended his arms out to either side of his round body. "You just... you open your arms and then you-you move close to the other person and then you... wrap your arms around them and you squeeze."

"How hard do you squeeze?"

"Ah. Sufficiently hard."

"Sufficiently hard enough to shift their internal organs?"

Aziraphale frowned at this one. "Um... no. I should think that would be just a _trifle_ too hard."

"Hard enough to make them bleed from the eyes?" Crowley sounded almost hopeful. As though there would be something tangible in this for him after all. "Cause an internal brain haemorrhage?"

"None of the above, you idiot!" Aziraphale snapped, losing his patience at last. It didn't happen often, but then he hadn't had quite as much to drink on this occasion as Crowley had. Which was enough to rival that of a solider who was just about to have his lower leg amputated in the middle of an active war zone with a dull pencil. "Just hard enough to express your affection but not so soft so as to not gain anything from it."

"No one said anything about expressing affection." Crowley felt momentarily panicked by the notion but Aziraphale was quite shot of his balking by that point and started approaching with the determination of a horror movie zombie intent on the brains of their bleach-blonde, likely already brainless, co-star.

"Come on, now."

Crowley, shoulders hiked up so far that his head had almost disappeared into his chest, slowly approached the angel with all the nervous energy of an animal about to take food from a humans fingers. Aziraphale moved in much the same slow, languid manner, clearly trying not to spook an obviously high-strung demon who was likely to shoot through the wall at the first sudden movement.

"There you are. You're doing _very_ well." He said encouragingly. Crowley puffed air up into the combed back coif of his hair, wrinkling his upper lip unappreciatively.

"Don't patronize me, angel." He was now within docking distance and he took a moment to work out the kinks in his neck, give his arms a stretch to make sure they weren't going to be inhibited in any way by the sleeves. He took a deep breath in through his nose, staggered its release. "All right. Here we go."

"I believe in you." Aziraphale said lovingly and with a smile so warm it sent something to squirming in Crowley's belly. Which naturally just pissed him off all the more.

"Oh, shut up." He said, quite as affectionately and then, with ever so tender care, slid his arms in underneath Aziraphale's; flinching at one moment as though expecting the angel to bite him. Aziraphale waited patiently for Crowley to make himself as comfortable as he required, slowly then wrapping his own arms around the demon's upper back and mid section. Their chests came together. Aziraphale gave Crowley a good squeeze. Crowley squeezed back, almost causing the top of Aziraphale's head to erupt.

"I _told_ you; not so hard!" He snapped, slapping his palm to the demon's hunched upper back.

"Sorry, I _am_ new to this!" He said in way of defence. He eased up on the pressure in his arms, tried to force himself to relax a little. He rested his head on Aziraphale's shoulder ( _which was awkward as he was taller_ ) and sniffed as the tang of the angels' cologne invaded his nostrils. He'd forgotten to miracle any on himself. He probably smelled _bad_. Aziraphale could probably _smell_ him _smelling bad_.

"See now. Isn't this nice?" Aziraphale said, eyes closed, entirely invested in the moment as he rubbed his hands over Crowley's stiff, unappreciative back.

"... Not really." Crowley muttered, which was a response he couldn't help but make ( _being himself_ ) but finding that he was actually rather starting to warm to it. Aziraphale was quite as soft and podgy as he remembered from his brief time spent in his body, but it was another matter to be pressed up against it rather than inhabiting it. It was the warmth and the hands on his back which felt good as they made their congenial rotations.

Crowley closed his eyes a moment, giving himself over to the feelings of peace and safety that were currently flowing through him. It felt all too much as though something inside of him had been starving for this and was now sucking in as much as it possibly could. He felt a little smile form on his face, one he would have been mortified to have anyone actually witness for it looked really rather goofy and might very well have been used to deride him on social media. If Crowley had been a teenage girl with horrible classmates and not a hug deprived demon currently hanging off of a jolly blonde angel like so much wet washing.

The angel who, seeming to have had his fill, bestowed upon the demon now a parting pet to the back and started to draw himself out of the embrace. Crowley felt panic burst through him, his eyes slamming open and he reflexively clasped his left hand about his right wrist, keeping his arms all but locked around Aziraphale's plump body.

"Not yet." He said, eyes darting about fearfully, burying his face in the angel's hair and clinging to him as obstinately as a child to the leg of a mother who is anxiously trying to extract herself from the day-care centre. Aziraphale's own eyes awned in their sockets as he permitted himself a moment in which to be entirely and unashamedly flummoxed by what was going on.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: And so the question begs; Have you hugged your demon today? ;)
> 
> If you enjoyed, please feel free to comment or kudos or even offer concrit if you deem it appropriate :) Also, make certain to give that special demon in your life a great, big, snuggle-bug of a cuddle. You know that they need it!
> 
> With all of my infernal love;  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	2. Or, where an angel stages an intervention.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley huffed softly, Aziraphale's words having rung true with the very cruellest of irony. For he knew full well that it was not the past for which he was pining. It was for a future, with the person he loved, that looked just a little bit different to the one that they were currently living.  
> The thought had infested him, such as nothing before had ever done and tapped its rotten fingernails to the walls of his mind and allured him ever closer with softly whispered susurrations of what might be...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens and all its motley assortment of characters do not belong to me. I swear to God I'm about the only person who does this stupid disclaimer thing, but you WATCH. The second I DON'T do it, I'll somehow end up getting sued. It could only happen to me.
> 
> A/N: Hey everyone :) Here is the continuation from Chapter one. All this subdividing is going to result in this story being over 53 chapters by the time I'm done. Daaaaang. Which means a lot of new author notes to start with.
> 
> First and foremost; because of the change of chapters, comments on the older, much longer chapters are going to contain spoilers. Please don't read the comments before reading the story itself, or it may get spoiled for you. Sort of like listening to the directors commentary of a movie before actually watching the movie itself. That sort of thing.  
> And as always, thanks to you guys for reading, commenting, and kudo-ing! Always greatly appreciated :)
> 
> Also, I feel like I should use all these new Author Notes to chuck in a random Good Omens fact or observation or something. Liven it up.
> 
> So, Good Omens Factoid No 1: Did anyone else notice that the other angels of Heaven also wore gold rings on their fingers? I don't think that all of them did, but I definitely noticed that SOME of them did. Interesting, yeah?
> 
> Okay, feel as free to have a read, my dears and I shall see you on the flip side!

**~X~**

* * *

**_~January 5th, 2019 ~_ **

**_~London Soho~_ **

In the following weeks, it became swiftly and unequivocally apparent to Aziraphale, that he had created something of a monster.

Deprive a man of food for so long, and he will devour a live cow if it were to cross the street in front of him. Drop him in the desert beneath the boiling sun and he will drain the nearest watering hole in under five minutes and with nothing but a straw as some sort of water transferring receptacle.

And so, deprive a demon of touch for over six thousand years it seems, and they will solder themselves to the nearest available warm body with the persistence of and as invariably unwelcomed as a paralysis tic.

Such that it was that near every interaction Crowley established with Aziraphale was punctuated throughout with some manner of a hug. From full body python like embrace, (with the inclusion once of a leg hooked unnecessarily about the angels' ankle) to a casual, yet somehow always intrinsically desperate arm about the shoulders.

He had a hug stored up for just about everything, it seemed. Good weather called for a hug. Gloomy weather called for an even firmer hug. Getting out of the car called for a celebratory hug that they had arrived safely at their destination. Another hug to celebrate walking through the door of said establishment and taking off their coats. The _After Dinner Mint hug_ was especially memorable, even whence compared to the _You Almost Stepped in Dog Shit but Avoided it at the very Last Moment, hug_.

And it was not just Aziraphale to whom these interactions were limited. He was the principle point of reference of course, by virtue of the fact that he was the one with whom Crowley spent the most time but much as a glass will overflow if you continue to carelessly pour water into it, so too did Crowley's sudden appreciation for hugging leak out onto anyone whom came anywhere close to his gravitational field. Aziraphale was not often prone to fits of embarrassment concerning the general human public, but he did in fact feel just the slightest bit self-conscious when Crowley wrapped a much bemused trainee barrister up in his arms and all but expunged her eyes from their sockets, simply because she had paused to wipe an errant crumb from their table.

As such things are typically want to do, the tipping point was ever so graciously meandering closer. It might not have taken so long to instigate the tilt, if not for the fact that Aziraphale, by nature of what he was, possessed incomparable patience. And, if he was to be honest, half suspected that Crowley might have been, as the demon might say, ' _taking the piss_ ' just so as to teach his friend a lesson for having coaxed him into something he had plainly been uncomfortable with.

By a humans estimation, keeping a joke running for so long might seem unreasonable, but a matter of weeks was merely a bat of the eye for a pair of occult beings ( _ethereal_ ) who had been around since before the time of Methuselah. It would hardly have surprised Aziraphale in the least if Crowley was simply putting just that little extra effort into trying to antagonize him. After all, they had technically been out of work some time now. Such little amusements were how Crowley was known to pass the time.

But the tipping point did eventually arrive, in the form of one Anthony J. Crowley ( _more the surprising that in his boredom Crowley hadn't invested some time in ascribing an affiliated name to the J_ ) swanning into Aziraphale's book shop one evening with a box DVD set in one hand and a blanket in the other. Aziraphale had the misfortune of being in the company of an unwanted customer at that time (let's be honest, all customers were unwanted so far as he was concerned) and took a pause long enough from passively glowering from behind a tower of books, stacked as though to represent a metaphorical and heavy handed reference to a staircase leading upwards, to stare at the approaching demon.

"Hey Aziraphale. Thought we could stay in tonight. Binge watch some Golden Girls." Crowley said, as way of announcing himself. He followed this up, as Aziraphale had come to expect, with a hug that encircled his ribcage like a 16th century corset. ( _Something he had regrettable experience with following a certain job needing to be conducted for a reason that at the time must have seemed important but in hindsight now seemed ridiculous and of little value other than granting him a perspective into what it was like to wear a corset_ ).

"Hello Crowley. Lovely to see you." Aziraphale said, trying and failing not to stare at the soft, plainly recently purchased blanket Crowley had tucked beneath his arm. It was of that fluffy, green material and colour must usually ascribed to baby's belongings and festooned with small stitched on cartoon elephants, giraffes and various other anthropomorphized African animals. "I, um..." He blinked, allowing his natural effervescent smile to pin itself back to his face and sent very specific instructions to his brain to avoid speculating further on the blanket. "I thought we had made plans to go to dinner tonight?"

Aziraphale fancied he saw the slightest flicker pass behind Crowley's glasses; a sure fire sign that his own brain was swiftly stringing together something that might, in some Universe or another, make a lick of sense. "Yeah, well... _would_ have been a laugh but then the temperature dropped and I thought... well, no point really going out in weather like this."

Aziraphale glanced through the store front window, witnessing a pair of sparrows flitting past, their wings cutting brief shadows through the warm ray of sunlight piercing the glass. People passed by contentedly on the street; lovers holding hands, children riding their bikes. One was even heard to vocally and enthusiastically proclaim, " _I've never known for us to have such a warm and balmy day this early in the Spring!_ " It seemed a strange thing for a child to say, but there you go.

Crowley's luminescent eyes didn't so much as shift behind his glasses. He kept them firmly focused on Aziraphale, as though to look away might break whatever influence he incorrectly assumed he might have held over the Angel. Aziraphale thought it prudent however, to raise another quite obvious point that would interfere with whatever strange plans Crowley had in store for their evening.

"Ah, well. Not that staying indoors doesn't sound a _jolly good idea._ But..." He paused, glancing over towards his lone customer, who had progressed to the rather distressing secondary phase of actually flicking through one of the books. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of Aziraphale's neck and he sequestered some of his concentration into worsening the pungent odour lingering in the shop before continuing. "But if you do recall, my dear, I am not in possession of a television. Let alone one that is capable of playing your _GDV_ devices."

"It's _DVD,_ angel. And that's not a problem." Crowley said, sauntering on past Aziraphale into his study and dropping the blanket and box set onto the couch before then leaning his elbow on the corner of the big screen television which had at some point materialized in the room. "I brought my own." And off of Aziraphale's wide eyed look of disbelief, added: "Well, not like it was doing much at my place. Think of it as an early birthday present."

"I don't _have_ a birthday!" Aziraphale rather well spluttered, a crease forming between his contrarily dark brows. "When did you even find time to set this up? I've been here all morning, I would have noticed you jostling about back there."

"You'd be surprised at what you _don't_ notice, angel." Crowley remarked with a meaningful smile, twitching his nose in that rabbit like manner he had learned from mimicking Aziraphale. He fairly much twirled on his cuban heels, plucking up the DVD from the couch. "I'm just gonna go ahead and set this up. What do ya think about ordering in, getting someone to bring the food to the shop?"

"Well... it all sounds lovely." Aziraphale said, for his appraisals were nearly always of a complimentary standard, in spite of what he was actually feeling. If he were to be honest with himself ( _may he be forgiven_ ) he was actually rather disappointed. He had been looking forward to going out that evening. A new Sushi train had opened in town and he thought it would be rather splendid fun to treat Crowley to the novel experience of conveyer belt food. He suspected that the demon had ulterior motives and, once the benighted customer had summarily fled the shop and its ever increasingly more malodorous odour, he was unsurprised to be proven right.

* * *

Following Aziraphale placing a rather extensive order through to _Amrutha Lounge_ and pouring them each a glass of wine, they settled onto the couch to watch Golden Girls; sharing a box of popcorn Crowley had at some point miracled out of some poor movie goers hands somewhere. It didn't take long before Crowley had wrapped himself in the blanket (though it was hardly cold) and subsequently aligned the right hand side of his body with the left of Aziraphale's. He leant into him, eschewing subtlety entirely by picking up the angels' arm and pulling it about his shoulders. Aziraphale continued to smile, as he always did, but felt ever the slightest quiver form in the bow of his lips which might, in any human person, have translated into something vocal and uncouth. To miss out on attending an exciting new restaurant in favour of perching on the couch, eating food out of paper containers and pretending to not so well watch a show Aziraphale was quite convinced Crowley had already seen over a dozen times already? He really was on the cusp of becoming _quite_ cross!

Crowley didn't even seem particularly interested in watching the show. Having taken off his glasses, he stared unblinkingly (as always) in the direction of the television screen, a small, somewhat self satisfied little smirk adorning the lower part of his face like low hanging Christmas ornament you can't help but dislike for whatever the reason. He had his arm wrapped firm about Aziraphale's paunchy midsection, in such a way he ought not have naturally achieved. Aziraphale suspected he might have preternaturally extended the length of his arm just so as to have it reach all the way around, which seemed a really rather pointless waste of his demonic abilities.

He felt rather the more relieved than he ought to have done when the food arrived. He was still forced to extract himself out of Crowley's grasp; a grasp he attributed to being much like that of a creeper vine which had transgressed the borders of its own pot and gone mooching about in the adjacent plants branches. All hands were on deck when it came to eating their 'TV dinners' but Crowley still found a way to keep himself tucked in to Aziraphale's side throughout the modest meal. More than once Aziraphale found his eye on the receiving end of a spiky poke from one of Crowley's prouder chunks of hair. He fought back the tears that might otherwise have erupted; fearing that it might have been cause enough to elicit another series of consolatory hugs.

When paper boxes had been scraped clean and appropriately deposited into the belly of the bin, they returned with barely fostered interest to the goings on of 'Golden Girls'. Aziraphale might have had the patience of a Saint, but he was finding himself getting ever more bored by the moment. He would have very much liked to have read a book or something, but it would have been impossible to even retrieve one, given Crowley's once more vice like grip about him. What was worse, Aziraphale realized, was that Crowley had brought all seven seasons of the Golden Girls and he had mentioned 'binging' on them. He tried not to outwardly sigh and reminded himself to be a decent chap about it all. One of the wine bottles was still within easy reach. Tucked in between Crowley's inner bicep and his cheek. Another glass or so should take the edge off.

* * *

At 10:45pm, Aziraphale was finding that there wasn't wine enough in the _world_ to effectively numb this progressively ridiculous situation. Crowley, no longer concerned with masquerading pretences, had dropped off to a drunken slumber a good fifteen minutes ago, leaving Aziraphale metaphorically stranded. He was unable to reach the remote, due to the angry vice like grip of the demon about his midsection and was out of wine, which was making the entire situation far the less tolerable. He could feel sobriety slowly creeping up on him, making him all the more horrifyingly lucid and aware of his predicament. If he had not been quite so intoxicated to begin with, he might have realized that he could simply miracle the television off but it took another good twenty minutes of sitting there in limbo before the thought formulated within his mind and he snapped the power to the television off with a clarity so sharp you could just about smell the barely veiled vehemence crackling in the air.

Demons and Angels did not require sleep in the same manner that human beings did. Certainly they got tired, but not at the same rate. They could go much longer without experiencing the negative effects of sleep deprivation. That being said, Aziraphale and Crowley had long ago resigned themselves to following a fairly standardized Earth Sleep Routine, in keeping with appearances and... well, because sleep was nice and a perfectly lovely way to relax. Crowley especially seemed to thrive on it and would squeeze in a nap just about wherever possible. On whatever flat enough of a surface was available.

Aziraphale rather felt that he would like to go to bed at that point and had little in the way of guilt concerning it, given what he had been made to endure for most of the evening.

"All right, dear. Time to wake up." He said, kindly as ever and gave Crowley's shoulder a shake that was not quite so gentile as his tone had been. Crowley, mouth agape, snoring from the core of his being as though fighting some manner of ill tempered battle with his unconscious state, snorted himself back into being and glanced bleary eyed about the room, smacking his lips distractedly.

"I been asleep long?" He asked, voice slurred both from said sleep and from the alcohol still dormant in his system. Neither of them had actively sought to sober up on this occasion; being that they had only gotten through the three bottles between them but Aziraphale fancied that Crowley would likely be feeling it in the morning all the same.

"About an hour or so. Never the mind." Aziraphale smiled beatifically, reaching down and unwinding Crowley's arm from about him, registering a small grunt of protest from the demon as he did. He gave him a conciliatory pet on the arm before climbing to his feet, feeling pins and needles immediately flush through the backs of his thighs and buttocks. "You'd best be along. It's getting very late and you'll be needing your sleep."

"What time is it?" Crowley asked, which in itself was very telling to Aziraphale. Crowley had never particularly cared at what hour he came and went. It wasn't as though he were vulnerable to any of the unsavoury goings on that the dead of the night was so often host to. And in spite of his earlier testament to the change in the weather, he didn't seem to feel the cold and had no observable concerns swanning about in clothing that might very well have seen a human of equivalent shape and size hunkered in around themselves in a frostbitten ball.

"Ah, well it is about..." Aziraphale glanced at the clock on the wall, wringing his fingers together in that way he knew was indicative of his increasing anxiety and still had no ability to curtail. "11:15pm."

Crowley grunted sleepily, sinking down further into his baby blanket and all but interring his body into the threads of the couch. "Still early... _ish_." He blinked up at Aziraphale. "What were you planning on doing now?"

Aziraphale thought this a rather silly question, given how well the pair knew one another. What did Crowley _suppose_ he was about to do at this hour of the night? Host a Mexican themed jamboree?

"I was planning on getting into bed. Reading a book." He twirled a finger semi-mockingly in the air. "Perhaps take in some of that delightful _sleep_ thing. Ta-ra."

Crowley gave another grunt, not quite so sleepy as the first. "Uh... yeah all right. Mind if I stay until I sober up a bit?"

Smiling came naturally to Aziraphale, so he was quite surprised to find he needed to put quite a bit more of an effort into maintaining one. It was not as though he wasn't fond of Crowley; he did in fact love him dearly and felt for him a strange sort of responsibility that a human person might feel towards a not particularly bright Labrador. He was simply rather perturbed about this sudden predilection Crowley had developed towards physical contact. It well rather bordered on becoming unhealthy and creating a dependency of which, supportive though Aziraphale considered himself to be, did not wish to be complicit in sustaining.

Because of course, there was no need for Crowley to have to wait to sober up. He could simply have used his abilities to expunge the alcohol from his system and return it to the wine bottle from whence it came. It was a poor excuse and rather the transparent one at that, given how clever the demon most usually was.

And it wasn't that Aziraphale was unkind. Or unsympathetic. Far from it. It was simply that... the _closeness_ was difficult. Crowley expressing affection in such an unapologetic manner was difficult. It battered at the flimsy walls Aziraphale had constructed about his own feelings.

It weakened him, to feel Crowley in his arms, the press of his body, the warmth of his breath. He had quietly pondered what such a thing would feel like for thousands of years now. To actually be _physically_ close to Crowley. Now he knew. And he enjoyed it just that little too much.

That frightened him. It was, after all, an enormous hurdle they'd traversed, simply in establishing that physical contact. Could it be that in crossing that boundary, they left themselves at the mercy of whatever other doors it might potentially open?

They were severed from Heaven and Hell now, after all. Crowley might very well believe that with their being 'let go' from their selective offices, they were now free to be... well, _closer_ than they had ever been. Aziraphale was quite certain that Crowley possessed feelings for him that were not so disparate from his own. He was simply... unable to fathom what form their relationship might take, if not the very same as the one they had now. He had never been in a position to allow himself to think on such things. And he wasn't quite sure if and when he would ever be.

Still, he was hardly about to kick his friend of six thousand years out onto the street, all for risk of being... well, _at risk_ and graciously permitted him to rest up on the couch. Aziraphale consequently took himself to the adjacent room, in which his single bed was tidily awaiting him (why Crowley insisted on that four poster behemoth he had somehow squeezed into his apartment, he did not know) and dressed in his striped pyjamas, carefully hanging what clothing required hanging and folding whatever items required folding and transferring whatever required washing into the wash basket. ( _Yes, he was fussy, but that was how one kept such meticulous order of their lives and garments over the passing of the centuries_ ).

He brushed and flossed his teeth and applied cream to his hands; for his palms and fingers oftentimes became dry from their constant contact with the pages of his books. He might too made himself a cocoa, as was tradition, but he feared that passing back through the sitting area might bring him into hugging distance of Crowley. And goodness knows where that might end up, given that he was still obstinately holding on to all the alcohol he'd drunk.

Aziraphale wondered if there might very well have been method in the madness. Was Crowley trying to _keep_ himself numb? A little disinhibited? It certainly wouldn't do for him to go wandering back out there and give him an opportunity to use that Dutch courage to act out whatever he may or may not have been planning.

Fortunately for Aziraphale, he was no longer affiliated with Heaven and as such, no one was actively monitoring him for the amount of 'frivolous miracles' he was executing. And so he went ahead and summoned a mug of delicious chocolate and marshmallow crowned cocoa onto his bedside table. He set himself up in bed, covers tucked neatly over the lower half of his body and pillows supporting his lower back and shoulders. He slid on his reading glasses, took from the bedside table the book that he was in the midst of reading, sipped from his cocoa and opened the pages to where he had last left off.

It was then that Crowley slunk into the bedroom and was received in much the same manner of a silent fart that no one wished to lay claim to.

"You know, it's um... it's cold out there... and boring... so..." His big yellow eyes glanced about the room, in a way Aziraphale found bizarrely self-conscious. "Mind if I just... hang out in here with you?"

Aziraphale had fairly much strained his eyes in an effort to keep them from rolling back in their sockets when the door had creaked open. He dug deep, way down deep into the so far almost entirely scraped free resevoir of his patience and mustered from the depths some scrap of resilience he wasn't at all sure he had.

"Not at all." He said, gesturing to one of the two comfortable armchairs he had set into the corners of the room. Both of which were plump, plush and entirely suited to hosting an otherwise needing body. "Please, have a seat wherever you like."

It was a poor choice of words, Aziraphale realized and one that Crowley naturally interpreted to suit his own needs. "Thanks." He had grunted, keeping his blanket clutched about his body like a medieval cape as he bypassed the chairs without even a perfunctory glance and settled expectantly onto the bed alongside Aziraphale. Being a King Single and barely suited for one 'man like body' let alone two, this quickly became an arrangement Aziraphale grew uncomfortable with. He was accustomed to sleeping alone, as he was quite certain Crowley was and even if he did possess some desire to share a bed, he would prefer it to have more stretching out room than this.

"Cozy?" He asked, wondering if any of his true feelings were noticeable in his otherwise chipper tone. If Crowley picked up on anything, he didn't bother with attending to it on any deeper level and simply re-wound himself about Aziraphale with a determination most intestinal parasites might have considered invasive.

"Perfect. Cheers." He replied, not two seconds before he was away to snoring again. Aziraphale treated himself to a heartfelt sigh of discomfort before focusing as much of his attention as he could on his book. At the very least, he could still reach his cocoa, since Crowley hadn't insisted on having Aziraphale's arm about him whilst simultaneously interring himself six feet deep within his aura.

It was about 1:35pm ( _and fifteen seconds, to be anally precise_ ) when Aziraphale transgressed to that ever just so space in which sleep was most readily attained. He drained the last of his cocoa, set his book aside and carefully placed his reading glasses atop them in preparation of his next session. He glanced down at the rusty red, contextually ruffled head of hair belonging to the benighted demon still insistent on sharing his bed, who was snoring up at him in what seemed to be a deliberately obnoxious rebuke.

"Well... I'm about ready to go to sleep." Aziraphale announced to no one in particular. Certainly not to Crowley, who, he imagined, would have ignored the inference even if he had been awake to hear it. "Time for you to make tracks, my dear. Home to your lovely apartment and your much, much, _much_ roomier bed."

He fluffed his fingertips over Crowley's arm and sides, resisting the ever rising urge to simply scruff his neck and hurl him off of the bed and right on out the window. When he proved resistant to this typically angelic 'ever so softly softly' approach, Aziraphale (with a not at all contained and hardly angelic 'huff') reached down and pinched the demon's cheek.

"Crowley!" He snapped, rounding off the pinch with a slight, yet sharply deposited slap to the rapidly reddening mark he had just made. Crowley jerked awake, with one of those full bodied spasms that always looks so startling and glared up at Aziraphale in his usual _'grumpy because I'm grumpy and extra grumpy because I'm tired and already hungover_ ' face of which Aziraphale was quite familiar with after six thousand years of seeing it.

"Ow! _What?!_ " He hissed, reaching up and glancing the heel of his hand over his cheek. Aziraphale, no longer concerned with bandying politeness ( _he was far too tired for bandying any sort of courtesy)_ flicked a finger towards the door.

"It is time for you to go. Go on now."

Crowley, with an expression of outraged offense, glanced to the clock above the doorway and gesticulated toward it with an urgency that suggested it was Aziraphale being unreasonable in this situation.

"But... but it's after _midnight_! What are you going to do? Just hurl me out onto the street and let me get robbed by a bunch of high schoolers on some sort of gang initiation bender?"

Aziraphale, currently in position of a right buttock which was severely cramped as a result of half of it being suspended off of the side of the mattress the last hour, was all but shot of patience. "You're hardly going to get robbed! You're a demon, with six thousand years of practice taking care of yourself in far more unsavoury parts of the world! I hardly think you likely to meet your end at the hands of whatever might be lurking the alleyways of night time Soho. And why should you be walking anyway? Your car is right outside the front door, just drive yourself home!"

"What's even the point of me going now? Can't you just let me sleep without being such a big nanna's blouse about it?" Crowley grumbled, already in the midst of preparing to sink his head back down into the mattress. Aziraphale, after enduring this overly tender and entirely un-character like behaviour for that past month and a bit, reached at long last the end of his ethereal tether.

"All right, that is _quite_ enough!" He said, flinging back the coverlet so that it buried Crowley beneath it momentarily and rose from the bed like a pyjama draped mummy from a cursed Egyptian tomb. He strode a good five feet away, well out of groping distance and placed his hands together to form that both inoffensive and equally serious gesture acquianted with 'a good talking to.' "... My dear, you have a problem."

"My problem is _you_ not letting me sleep. _Dear._ " Crowley deferred, uncaring and for the most part unheeding. Aziraphale had expected this. People with addiction issues, he had learned from his collection of self-help books, took quite the modicum of convincing before they were ready to acknowledge that they were destroying themselves.

"No. Your problem is that you are obsessed with hugging. Look at yourself!" He gestured to Crowley, curled up on a maroon coverlet and ensconced, further still, in the grip of a blanket clearly purchased from the newborn's section. "You once possessed an air of... grace and sophistication." ( _It was a stretch but rather the more convincing than saying he possessed the_ delusion _of being graceful and sophisticated_ ). "Now all you think about is hugging. You go about your business, distracted. Wondering where your next hug might be coming from. Obsessing over it. Hugging at inappropriate times, with no thought as to who might be around you to witness it."

"I don't hug at inappropriate times." Crowley snorted, defensively.

"You hugged the waiter at the diner who brought you a moist toilette from the dispensary!"

He could see Crowley working some sort of logic around in his head to make this at all seem reasonable. "Well it was _very_ refreshing."

"You hugged him _before_ you had even opened it."

"I was _anticipating_ that it would be refreshing. And what, pray tell, angel, is your point with all of this?"

Aziraphale felt his eyes widen with just a hint of the exasperation that was blooming rapidly inside of him. "My point is is that it's not normal to go around hugging people because they have brought you a serviette! Or because they held a door open for you, or handed you a pamphlet advertising twenty-percent mark down prices on all electronics in store!"

"Those were _very_ good deals..." Crowley remarked thoughtfully, chewing on the corner of his lip as though sincerely considering a future possibility of attending BrandMart and partaking of their low-quality technological produce. Aziraphale clapped his fingertips together a few times to elicit attention from an otherwise traditionally attention deficit demon.

"My dear fellow, you are _missing_ the point. I am concerned that your addiction is starting to take over your life. That you are using it as a placeholder for what is currently missing."

Crowley gave him a pointed, somewhat knowing look. "... This is because you missed out on going to the Sushi train tonight, isn't it?"

"Well, I was looking forward to it!" Aziraphale snapped, revealing the quite true and not at all noble seed from which his irritation had sprung. Crowley smirked a little, giving that familiar little sniff of which the angel thought ever so smug.

"Listen, you can save your breath, angel. Eh? I don't have a problem. It's just a... delightful quirk I've been indulging as a means to stave off boredom." He swung himself off of the bed, both long legs pinned together and striking through the air like a well sharpened sword. He glowered at Aziraphale, sanctioning the edges of the babies blanket across his chest much like a ladies travelling coat. "I can quit anytime I want. And quite frankly, I'm offended by the insinuation that I would develop any kind of dependency on _you._ "

"Well, I am quite relieved to hear it. Steady as you go." Aziraphale shot back, passing his hand through the air in a definitive and unquestionable gesture to ' _fuck off_ '. Crowley, still wearing a broody expression that might very well have been fetching if not for the fact that he was simply too much of a dork to pull it off, made two long limbered, plainly exaggerated strides that brought him flush to the door. He got any more dramatic with his saunter and he would be lucky to keep an even inch between his groin and the floor, Aziraphale thought to himself.

"Oh, I _will_. Don't you worry, angel. I'll be just fine. Don't you worry your pretty little head about me, wandering the streets alone in the dark and the cold, at the mercy of ruffians and crackheads and loose women!"

He whipped open the door, taking a firm hold of it as he stepped out into the room beyond and then went to great strains to slam it shut behind him. It didn't quite work out, as the door was improperly fitted and simply snagged on the plush carpet as it made its way back towards the jam but Crowley didn't let this deter him. He took hold of the doorknob, opened the door up wide again, gave Aziraphale a filthy look before pulling the door shut with his entire body weight, producing a far more satisfying sound. Aziraphale, somewhat betwixt amusement and deep irritation, straightened out the lapels of his pyjama's; more as a means of instilling calm, rather than them requiring any sort of adjustment.

"Well I should think if you didn't wish to be targeted on the streets that you might dispense with the fluffy blanket, but there you go." He permitted himself just the smallest, self-satisfied and as such, deeply sinful, smile. "Should hardly think you'd have any sorts of troubles on behalf of the ' _loose women_ ', however."

Aziraphale was just on the verge of sliding his leg back beneath the covers, when the door opened and Crowley not so much slinked as he did slough back into the room, his eyes looking larger and more the shiny than ever.

"Okay, _I'm sorry_. I know I've got a problem, angel. I don't know how to stop it." His momentary despair shifted then to something akin to fury and he pointed an accusatory finger at the increasingly flummoxed Aziraphale. "It's all your fault, you know. I never wanted to try it. You pushed it on me and now I crave it all the time! What kind of sick game is that, huh? Is that how you angels play it? Give 'em a couple of free tastes, get 'em hooked and then watch them make fools of themselves hunting for more!?"

"I didn't give you a hug because I expected it would turn you into a slathering lunatic!" Aziraphale protested, demonstrably resenting the suggestion that he had any part in provoking this absurd reaction to what he supposed to be a standard element of the 'corporeal experience'. "I hugged you because I thought that you needed it!"

"Well, I never _knew_ I ever needed it, did I?" Crowley hissed, hatefully, resentfully and verily quivering like a cement mixer in want of his next fix. He edged closer, the fluffy blanket barely finding purchase on his shoulders as his arms transgressed from tiny little tyrannosaurus-rex esque hooks into something that the Slenderman might have otherwise aspired to. "Come on... just give me one for the road."

Aziraphale couldn't have imagined he could feel more appalled (or cheapened) by the request. "I'm not just... giving you _one_ for the road!"

"Come on, you know I'm good for it." Crowley insisted, reaching out towards him now with a desperation rivalled only by the victims of the Titanic pleading with the selfish bastards in the near empty nearby lifeboats to pony up a spot. Aziraphale made well and sure to step further out of grabbing distance.

"No! You need to _stop_. This is unhealthy and quite frankly... it borders on creepy."

Crowley's eyes narrowed into vengeful little yellow slivers. A façade that might have looked more threatening if he weren't currently slumped to his knees, and clutching his midsection as though someone had just come alone and clouted him in the sternum with a two-by-four.

"What, you think you're the only one I can go to for hugs? There are plenty of people I can get it from, buddy."

Aziraphale held up both hands diplomatically. "Crowley, you _can't_ just go out in human society and start hugging people willy-nilly. That's how you ended up with that restraining order, remember?"

"Seemed somewhat of an overreaction." Crowley mused, not sounding altogether convinced himself.

"You invited yourself into his house to congratulate him over growing such 'vivacious gardenia's', so _no_ , I can't say that I agree to it being an overreaction." Aziraphale paused once more to unnecessarily straighten his pyjama's. "Neither did his wife. Or would you customarily consider it to be a gesture of affection to clonk someone over the head with a wok?"

"I wouldn't have minded so much, if she hadn't been cooking stir-fry with it beforehand. Two weeks on and I'm still picking chunks of water chestnut out of my hair."

Sensing that they were about to embark on their standardized 'going about in circles' which could last well into the dawn once it gained traction, Aziraphale (more keen on sleep than he could ever quite remember being) pinched fingertips to his thumbs to form the international sign for ' _zip it ever so loquacious demon_ '.

"I am not trying to upset you, Crowley. I am trying to _help_ you."

"Oh, don't give me that." Crowley sniped and Aziraphale was genuinely shocked to find him moved, it seemed, to the verge of tears. It wasn't all that unusual, in that Crowley was a surprisingly sensitive demon and more susceptible to indulging those feelings when weakened by the drink, but appropriately sobering all the same. "You don't know what it's like. I've been thrown out of the place that all the people who were thrown out of Heaven were thrown into. I'm the _ultimate_ loser. I mean... it's not like I miss it. I don't even really miss Heaven, to tell you the truth. It was a shitfully boring place. Just sometimes..." He sighed, glanced down at his hands. Looking to be truly and authentically at odds with himself. "Sometimes I miss the... _feeling_. Of your brain being... _light_. All that stupid inner peace, pish." He gave Aziraphale a somewhat desperate and entirely heartbreaking look. "When you gave me that stupid hug, it was like... I was back there a while, you know? It felt good. I could just... let go. Didn't have to be drunk, didn't have to be anything but right there. So easy to go to sleep when you feel that... safe." He snorted, self mockingly. Dismissing out of hand everything he had just indulged. "Fuck, that's stupid. Stupid nonsense that is. I don't know what I'm saying."

"I do." Aziraphale said kindly, the last tiny tendril of irritation sliding back into the carapace of the seed from whence it came. He felt immediately and completely ashamed of himself for being so remiss of what was ever so obvious. It wasn't as though they hadn't discussed such things in the past, after all. Perhaps a few bottles further down the rung than was entirely necessary, but nevertheless. "And I'm so sorry. I haven't at all been looking at this from your angle."

"It's a stupid angle." Crowley critiqued, curling his lip in that way which suggested he had little time for the pointless thing he had been presented with. As per their game, Aziraphale deflected the statement.

"Oh, it's hardly stupid. You were a being of love, once. It would seem some of that original core of you remains."

Now Crowley looked truly depressed, blowing air through his pursed lips to form a dismissive horse like snort. Aziraphale just smiled to see it.

"Say what you will but those still waters run deep. Just as I have always suspected."

"Angel, please. You're killing me here." Crowley begged, looking for all intents and purposes like he would very much appreciate melting into a big puddle on the carpet and sluicing away to places where this conversation could no longer reach him. On this occasion, Aziraphale saw fit to take mercy.

"Well, I should think the most obvious solution is simply to wean you back. You may be forgiven for being a little overindulgent; given your sustained withdrawal from anything remotely resembling affection." Aziraphale chanced kneeling down, casting that ever so beatific and deeply aggravating smile over Crowley's hunkered, desolate form. "Given some practice, I'm certain you will be able to relegate your hugging into a more appropriate routine. One that does not interfere with your every day life and prohibit you from being able to function."

"You know I'm not actually strung out on meth, right?" Crowley asked, somewhat bemused by how seriously Aziraphale was taking this. Aziraphale's smile rode only the higher into the apples of his cheeks and it was somehow all the sadder than it had been moments before.

"My dear... there is no greater addiction than the craving for what has been lost."

Crowley huffed softly, Aziraphale's words having rung true with the very cruellest of irony. For he knew full well that it was not the _past_ for which he was pining. It was for a future, with the person he loved, that looked just a little bit different to the one that they were currently living. The thought had infested him, such as nothing before had ever done and tapped its rotten fingernails to the walls of his mind and allured him ever closer with softly whispered susurrations of what might be.

He was accustomed to the tempting. Never before had he been on the receiving end of it. And that was perhaps, the very cruellest irony of them all.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you for taking time out of your day to read! Note, that it is chapter four in which the plot concerning the Brand New Apocalypse starts up; these first two are really just sort of character development chapters.
> 
> If you enjoyed, feel free to express yourself. Even if it is just in the form of doing a happy little dance whilst rubbing instant custard through your hair. Whatever floats your boat, as they say! Until next time and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~Madammortis~ xxx ooo


	3. Or, where Aziraphale gets a coin glued to his hand.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He tapped a finger to one of the buttons on Aziraphale's waistcoat, which was hanging by a thread and it zipped neatly back into place, adding pressure once more into the rise of his stomach. Crowley's fingers lingered on the overlapping halves of the waistcoat, on the pretence of straightening it. His warm breath lit flush to Aziraphale's ear, his words not nearly so confident as he might have otherwise wanted them to be. He was insecure at times and never the more when he might have broached the shallow den in which his vulnerability slumbered. "You let me know if you need any... help if the urge takes you. When it takes you." And because Aziraphale was staring back at him with something that wasn't quite altogether shock, he added: "None of Them would ever have to know. You know...?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: I do not own Good Omens or any of its adorable array of characters. More's the pity.
> 
> A/N: I've noticed that I have a bad habit of writing Crowley as a little ADHD; which of course stands for Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Demon. Which is actually rather fun, because he does strike me as the type who, now that the is no longer working, would find it difficult to redirect his energy and become a little dependent on Aziraphale to provide him with amusement. Kind of like a toddler, who, after being asked what it is they have in their mouth, takes off across the room with the turbo dynamic efficiency of a bullet train. … You know, I can actually see that:
> 
> Aziraphale: Crowley!  
> Crowley: (Freezes, glances slowly over his shoulder)  
> Aziraphale: What have you got in your mouth?  
> Crowley: (Runs lankily away)  
> Aziraphale: Come back here and spit it out right this minute! (Pins Crowley down and fishes a marble out of his mouth) You could have choked on that! Why on earth would you put a marble in your mouth?!
> 
> And you just know it would have been to punish Aziraphale in some way, because he hadn't been paying attention to him. 'I'll show you, I'll choke myself with this marble. How you like THAT? Oh, I see I've got your attention, NOW.'
> 
> This chapter was inspired, of course, by Crowley's once insistence on gluing coins to the sidewalk and a further exploration as to how Aziraphale might react to those instances where Crowley's demonic mischief becomes just that slightest bit malignant. I imagine that Aziraphale can put up with a great deal so far as Crowley is concerned, but not when the behaviour borders on cruelty. Hope that you enjoy it!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Wednesday, January 10th, 2001~** _

**_Polo Bar - Liverpool Street, London... _ **

Aziraphale usually had a great deal of tolerance when it came to Crowley's, for lack of a better term, 'evil doings'.

This was, at least in part, because Aziraphale himself was an Angel and patience was naturally a part of their genetic makeup but secondly and perhaps more principally so, because Crowley was... well... simply rather bad at _being_ bad.

His go to often seemed to be more along the lines of 'semi-major inconveniences', such as letting the air out of car tires and walking through wet concrete before it had set. The crown jewel of his career, he proudly attested to being the time he had brought down every mobile phone network in the London area, seconded alone by his instrumental work in designing the M25 highway by some genuinely rather skilled subterfuge, computer hacking and by moving some markers around a field during the night.

There were times, however, when his mischief encroached, if not entered at full swagger, into the realm of genuine malice. And it was on these occasions, that Aziraphale felt it something of a moral obligation (to say nothing of his celestial duties) to step in and put a stop to the otherwise uncouth behaviour.

One of these occasions came into play on a Thursday evening in the year 2001. It was January the 10th, to be precise. Twelve past six, to be even more precise. Aziraphale and Crowley were sitting at a discreet table in an otherwise non-discreet café, having a cup of tea and coffee, respectively. Aziraphale had ordered a very un-discreet chunk of key-lime pie, which Crowley was, in turn, thoroughly enjoying witnessing the consumption of.

If you were to ask as to the reason they had come together on this occasion, neither angel nor demon would be in the position to provide you with an answer, as they themselves could quite honestly not recall. Aziraphale would remember that the pie was sweet, the pastry just the right side of crumbly and that the cream was fresh. Crowley remembered that his coffee had gone cold, because he was too distracted by watching Aziraphale eat.

Demons, you see, take pleasure in seeing someone submit to their desires. They take enormous _obscene_ pleasure from it, in fact. And in Crowley's humble opinion, watching an angel quite as stuffy and buttoned down as Aziraphale practically making love to every forkful he put between his lips, felt rather as good as he imagined sex to have been. So he gathered. Though if he made anywhere near the amount of noise that humans seemed to make on some of those television shows, he would have found himself swiftly ejected from whichever restaurant they were in.

 _Was all that squawking_ really _necessary_? he often wondered, when inadvertently stumbling across pornography whilst flicking through tv stations of a night. _Seems a perfectly good way to distract yourself from what's going on down below. Putting all that extra energy into the 'Oooh-oooh-ah-ah' stuff._ _And for that matter... is this the sort of mess I can expect if I put in a call to maintenance about the leak under my sink?_

A question which resulted in Crowley wasting many a frivolous miracle on fixing his own appliances, rather than running the risk of some burly plumber turning up and trying to 'dredge his pipes' or something equally as terrifying. It did in fact culminate in Crowley developing a very real and very genuine fear of service people and if any _were_ required to enter his apartment, he prefaced their visit by firmly explaining that no, he did not care how big their wrench was, his husband was _not_ away on business and under no circumstances did he wish to be jostled about on top of the washing machine he _did not_ own, whilst it was running through the spin cycle. This resulted in some naturally rather perturbed expressions in return, but Crowley had remained so far unmolested and this was validation enough that his disclaimer had the intended effect.

If Aziraphale ever noticed the intensity in which Crowley observed him whilst eating, he said nothing of it. Crowley supposed he _couldn't_ take much notice; absorbed as he always was with his meal and the array of flavours swishing about on his celestial tongue. Even on those certain occasions when Crowley forgot himself and got a bit close, so that he was practically an inch off of the angel's plate, he didn't seem to pick up on anything untoward.

Whatever conversation they must have been having was put on hold as Crowley, taking notice of something through the window, reached across to clasp the inside of Aziraphale's elbow.

"Don't look now, we got ourselves a hot contender at ten o'clock."

Aziraphale looked to where Crowley had indicated and felt the cockles of his cherubic heart immediately chill. It was a homeless man, hunkered against the cold in a tattered brown jacket which had clearly seen much better days and with a beard that had clear cut aspirations to circumvent the plateau of the gentleman's stomach and graze the concave oasis of his bellybutton. Which was exposed from beneath what looked to be an old lavender crop top; complete with stains that Aziraphale could only hope were from food stuffs of the beige coloured variety.

"A homeless man, Crowley? Really?" He saw the demon's eyes flick briefly towards him from behind the lens of his glasses, a nasty smile playing on his lips.

"Ooh wait... yep. He's moving in for the kill." Crowley sounded just as delighted as a father might have been when holding his firstborn in his arms. Aziraphale watched, with mounting trepidation as the homeless man stopped, staring down at the footpath by the café window. His eyes may have lit up, though they were mostly obscured by the mass of tangled hair about his face but Aziraphale could tell from his body posture that he had found something which pleased him. He eased up out of his chair slightly, just enough so that he could see what it was that the homeless man had spotted.

It was an unnaturally shiny looking (preternaturally enhanced, most likely) £1 coin.

Aziraphale sank back into his seat with a frustrated sigh. "Oh, for Heaven's sake... _that_ one again?"

"The classics never go out of style, angel." Crowley said, pinching a piece of rust coloured hair between his fingers and giving it a distracted twirl. He wore it long back then, down to his shoulders and would sometimes twist it into a small bun when the front layers got to irritating him. For all his attention to grooming, he rarely looked tidy, Aziraphale thought, who, though maintaining perhaps the exact same hairstyle he'd had since the Beginning, always ensured that it was neatly presented.

The homeless man by this point had managed to bend what was clearly a very ache riddled body into a position best suited for appropriating the coin. His aged knees trembled and his fingers, protruding from a pair of stereotypical 'dwelling inhibited persons' knitted fingerless gloves looked positively wrecked by arthritis. They shook, palsy like as his grubby fingertips pinched the sides of the coin and attempted to lift it from the concrete pathway.

It didn't budge an inch.

Crowley had perhaps one of the most beautiful smiles Aziraphale had ever seen. It was a rare thing to witness and hardly ever genuine at that but when he did smile it was because he was, in his heart, one hundred and ten percent purely and blissfully happy. The unfortunate side effect of his being happy however, was that it usually coincided with someone else being miserable. Crowley had a positively radiant smile on his lips at that moment, burbling with barely suppressed joy as he observed the struggles of a near crippled, homeless man, trying in vain to pluck up a purposefully seductive looking coin that Crowley had, only a half hour earlier, glued to the footpath.

This was quite enough for Aziraphale, an angel who didn't see red so much as bellicose mauve but at that moment could very well have reached across the table and slapped the smile from Crowley's contented little face.

"You are truly _unbelievable_." He hissed, wiping his mouth on a serviette (He had lost whatever appetite he'd had, which was telling in and of itself) and rising tempestuously from his seat. Ignoring Crowley's confused expression, he reached around to the back of the demon's chair and whipped his black designer coat off of the arms. He carried it with him to the door, stepped out into the cold clasp of the night and was at the homeless man's side with much greater speed than you might have thought him capable, given his otherwise husky appearance.

"Sir, allow me." He said, with a beaming smile that stole all the way through the depths of his eyes so that his entire face seemed to radiate pure, undiluted warmth. He reached down, Miracling the glue from the base of the coin and plucking it easily from the sidewalk. He placed it then, with a generous flick of his wrist into the man's knitted palm, who looked at both it and the effervescently smiling angel with a slightly nonplussed expression.

"Oh... thanks." He said, being of the type who might otherwise have not been so gracious in his embarrassment except for the fact that he was in the presence of Aziraphale. An angel who exuded so much genuinely good will that it imperatively soothed the minds of those humans he came into contact with. Usually. Sometimes it frightened them.

Aziraphale tilted his head, his smile somehow taking it up another notch so that he was near glowing with compassion. He took the homeless mans grubby hands between his own, petted them and then draped Crowley's coat over his shoulders.

"And do take this, won't you? It's frightfully cold out tonight. Wouldn't want you catching a chill."

Another gesture that might have been refused if it had not come from the likes of Aziraphale. The man accepted the coat, pulling it around the old tattered garment he was currently wearing and with a gruffly muttered note of thanks, made his way back down the street. It would not have taken him long to notice that his hands were now blessedly free from the arthritis and there was not but a remainder of the shakes and pain that had assailed his body for God knows how long. There was also no plaque on his teeth; what few remained anyway. Aziraphale had decided to throw that one in as a bonus.

He watched him go, smiling cherubically all the while as Crowley, mouth agape in pure, unfettered astonishment, loped up to join him on the sidewalk.

"Did you really just... give that old homeless guy my coat?"

Aziraphale gave him a very curt look, all the warmth he had directed at the homeless man, sequestered neatly away.

"Seems the _least_ you could do. After playing such an appalling prank on the poor fellow." He smiled a little, leaning close and lowering his voice. "It's going to be quite wonderful, actually. When he gets back to wherever he's going, he's going to find a winning scratchy ticket in the pocket for two thousand pounds."

"He's going to find a lot more than _that_ ; my bloody wallet and keychain are still in the damn pockets!" And just like that, Crowley swanned off down the sidewalk, so purely irritated that he didn't even stick his hands into his trouser pockets, as was his custom. Aziraphale had to scurry to keep up, his legs being far shorter than the demon's almost ridiculously long pins. ( _Well, whose weren't really?_ )

"Are you _seriously_ about to go and mug a homeless man of a coat that you probably just diabolicalled out of nothing anyway?!" He exclaimed between desperately gathered reefs of air. My goodness, he _was_ out of shape, wasn't he?

"Damn straight. I mean, what cheek have you got, giving away other people's belongings? Isn't that a sin in and of itself, angel?"

"I should hardly think so! Not when the coat belongings to a demon, who is having his fun at the expense of a very sick and very sad old man. If anything, it was a charity. And it _is_ technically my job to thwart you."

"To thwart my major malpractices and misgivings not my _petty little pleasures_ , you big feathered buzzkill!" Crowley was quickly gaining ground on the unsuspecting, soon to be moderately wealthy homeless man, who had actually paused long enough to stare at his hands in some confusion. Aziraphale knew he would need to act quickly, or the demon would be on him like a bad hat at a Christmas party.

He glanced about, finding that no one was looking their way and worked up the quickest minor miracle he could think of at that time; a garden rake. Crowley's booted toe came squarely down on the tines and the handle shot up, slamming into his nose and subsequently shattering the cartilage on impact.

" _AGH!_ " His hands slapped to his face, knocking off his glasses in the process. Aziraphale, bug eyed and shocked by what he had done, immediately scooped them up off of the ground before they got trampled by Crowley's now maniacally dancing feet.

"You... fucking _idiot_!" The demon screamed, inadvertently alerting the homeless man to his presence in the process of unleashing all his rage. He made fast work of his newly healed body in hauling arse across the street and weaving amongst oncoming vehicles as though he were filming a parkour video for YouTube.

Crowley snarled after him, though not very efficiently as he was still staggering about with his hands clapped across his face and his eyes pinned shut to prevent the general population from seeing their true nature. Also, for virtue of the fact that they were swimming with tears. "Come _BACK_ you filth riddled, postulant ingrown rectal pubic hair waste of space transient drunken piece of shit _BUM!_! You get back here with my fucking coat or I swear to Satan, _I'll_ -"

Aziraphale held up a set of keys and jingled them to elicit Crowley's attention. The demon cracked open one weepy eye at the sound. "I took your keys and wallet out first." He tentatively reached over, tucking the wallet into the rear pocket of Crowley's pants and wedging the keys into a front pocket. "Now, let me take a look."

"Shove off. You've done enough 'good deeds' for one night, angel." Crowley snapped, shrugging his shoulder away with such exaggeration that Aziraphale knew he didn't at all mean what he was saying. He simply wanted to be chased, as per the norm.

"Well, it's not as though you didn't deserve it." He effaced, waving a finger to send the rake away and then guiding Crowley over to a nearby bus bench and encouraging him to sit. "Take your hands away?"

Crowley made a point of dropping his hands dramatically into his lap and turning his head towards Aziraphale with an unimpressed look. The yellow of his eyes clashed horribly with the red of the blood that had fairly much geysered out of both nostrils. There was a split running across the bridge of his nose that was also bleeding freely.

Aziraphale's brows creased sympathetically. Crowley may have been a demon yes, but he still felt awful for having caused him injury. They were friends after all, in spite of their being hereditary enemies. "Oh... I _am_ sorry, my dear."

"I mean what were you thinking? A _garden rake!?_ You couldn't have come up with something less destructive? Turn the cement into a travelator and shove it in reverse? Invisible wall made from invisible _sponge_? Actually just run faster and catch the Heaven up?"

"I was cross." Aziraphale conceded, passing both hands over Crowley's petulant features and siphoning off the blood. He touched his fingers to the split in his nose and guided energy into it to heal the broken cartilage. "What you did was not nice, Crowley."

"That's because I'm _not_ nice!" Crowley snarled and Aziraphale flinched, having once more forgotten that it was, for whatever reason, the demon's trigger word. "When are you going to get that through your thick head? I'm a _demon,_ in case it suits you to forget. Not like _I_ can forget it, can I?!"

"I know, I know... I'm sorry. For the rake and for... inferring that you were anything other than a terrible demon." And at this, he did actually have to chuckle, watching Crowley flinch a little as the crack in his nose clicked together. "And you really are rather a _terrible_ demon."

"Oh _ha_." Crowley said, pulling a face as he gingerly fingered and pinched the bridge of his nose. Finding everything in order, he gestured for his glasses to be returned and he slid them back into place. Aziraphale gasped suddenly, jolting up off the bench as though something sharp had jabbed him in the thigh. "What?"

"Oh, I just realized..." He turned and looked back the way they came, fingers clasped across his mouth despairingly. "Oh, we never paid the _bill!"_

He looked like he was about to cry. For Crowley, this was quite enough recompense for having endured the indignity of a broken nose and a lost coat.

"Hmph. Well... sucks to be them." He grinned as he clambered to his feet and shoved his hands into his pockets. "Night cap?"

Aziraphale stared at him, positively goggle eyed in response. "What do you mean 'night cap?' Clearly, I need to go back and settle our account with the café."

Crowley grunted his exasperation towards the sky. " _Angel_! It was like... _ten_ pounds! It won't be the end of the world if you don't pay a ten pound tab."

"But it'll only take a moment. I could have _already_ gone and paid in the time it has taken us to have this argument."

"This is _not_ an argument. This is you, as usual, being far too good for your _own_ good." Crowley slid his wallet out from the back pocket of his trousers and opened it. There wasn't much inside. He kept some coins, for the obvious reasons (gluing them to the sidewalk, not for paying parking, of course) and a bank card to which he had linked an account that was currently in balance approximately nine point five million pounds. _(Unlike Aziraphale, Crowley had never actually earned any of the money in his possession, he'd simply opened up the bank account and miracled a number into their computer system. The rather modest sum, as it were, of ten million pounds. It seemed, to Crowley, a nice tidy amount. It was certainly much easier than miracling actual physical currency into his hands whenever he wanted to purchase something)._

He had also, in the window panel, a photograph of he and Aziraphale. Aziraphale loathed the picture, as he had been eating at the time Crowley decided to take it (by use of a technique he would later perfect and pass on to the human world in the form of 'selfies') and for that very reason Crowley thought it quite the very best picture ever and made innumerable copies of it, which he subsequently went and decorated every available surface with. Some of these copies he had forwarded to Aziraphale by courier, arranging it in such a way that Aziraphale missed the drop off at his bookshop and had to go down to the post office to pick it up. He was hardly amused when, having expended all that effort otherwise best spent on reading or enjoying a delicious meal, he opened the large box and found inside the picture, blown up to about five times its original size and encased in a gold frame with the words ' _All hail Aziraphale, slayer of the dread profiterole_ ' emblazoned across the glass.

This however paled in gleeful comparison to the fury Aziraphale broached when he returned back to his shop and found that, in his absence, Crowley had literally wallpapered with the much hated photograph and was perched up, single malt in hand, on Aziraphale's study chair with perhaps the singularly most exquisite smile the angel had ever borne witness to.

Aziraphale himself smiled, in spite of the much maligned photograph making yet another appearance, believing that Crowley was passing over his contribution towards the tab.

"Oh. Thankyou." He said, reaching out to accept the coin that Crowley was handing him. But Crowley held it up, out of reach, pinched between the nails of his index and middle finger. He gave Aziraphale a long look over his glasses before turning his head ever so slightly and blowing gently onto the back of the coin.

Aziraphale knew precisely what he had done. He had miracled glue onto the damned thing. Sure enough, Crowley, smiling provocatively, starting slowly crouching, bringing the pound closer and closer to the pavement. Aziraphale's smile slid off of his face as a rare, unfamiliar wave of anger started rising in him like a tide of boiling water. Crowley was doing this intentionally, simply to see how far he could push him before he snapped. He'd done it before; countless times actually and never seemed to tire of getting a rise out of an otherwise eternally passive and venerable being.

Aziraphale knew quite well the game that he was playing. And, just as he always did, he fell headlong into the trap and bit the lure that had been blatantly dangled before him.

"Crowley. No. _No._ Crowley stop. Stop. _Crowley_. Stop." He warned, holding up a cautionary finger which Crowley paid about as much attention to as he might have a slightly bothersome mosquito. He continued to sink slowly into a crouched position, bringing the coin closer and closer to the pavement. Grinning wickedly all the while.

"I said _stop!_ " Aziraphale said and, in a moment he would look back on and think ' _Why, I'm a celestial being of Heaven. Surely I could have just miracled the coin away'_ made the decision to physically intervene on the minor annoyance that was about to occur. He swooped in ( _well not swooped so much as lurched in_ ) grabbing the demon about the wrist and attempting to wrench him upright. Because Crowley was an ageless creature in possession of a level of maturity aspired to by most overtired three year old's, he immediately ( _and ineffectively_ ) fought back.

And so, the angel and the demon, first witnessed standing watch atop the wall of the Garden of Eden, set a sterling example for all their associated bretheren, by wrestling about like a couple of toddlers fighting over a toy. They may have been fighting still, if not for the intervention of the nearby Kebab shop owner who, having observed their childish little fracas for some time, decided that it had gone on just long enough so as to pose a potential risk to his business.

"Oi, you two!" He yelled, to which Crowley and Aziraphale, now on their feet and clothing appropriately scuffed and tugged and hair sticking out to every which way, turned to acknowledge the fact that, yes, they had gone and made a public nuisance of themselves. "I don't know what the problem is but take your lovers tiff somewhere else!"

"Oh, no. _No_ , he's not my lover." Aziraphale quickly corrected, flushing to hear such a thing even though it had hardly been the first time they'd been mistaken as such. Crowley, having not the least intention of clearing up said misunderstanding, leaned in and took to exaggeratedly kissing the side of Aziraphale's face and neck. "I don't even know him."

"Well he certainly seems to know _you_." Said the kebab shop owner, obviously unconvinced. Aziraphale slapped at Crowley's hands, which were attempting to slide around his hips.

" _Would you stop that?!_ Look, terribly sorry to have disturbed you. We'll be on our way."

Satisfied that they were no longer blocking his doorway, the kebab shop owner moved on with his life, returning to the underrated and not terribly well appreciated art of preparing food for university students, stoners and teenage binge drinkers. Crowley continued his laborious and over the top attentions until the door to the shop had shut and then he twirled on his heel, laughing to the sky as he sauntered on down the sidewalk, hands returned to the labyrinth of his pockets as per the norm.

"Well if _that_ doesn't make us the talking point of the fast food demographic, then nothing will!" He crowed, chuckling with unabashed delight to himself as Aziraphale wiped at the saliva peppered across his face and neck with his handkerchief, realizing, as he did that the coin had affixed itself to his right palm.

"I _do_ wish you wouldn't do that." He grumbled, passing a finger across the coin so that the glue dispersed. As per his angelic nature, he did not pocket it but instead handed it back to Crowley, who plucked it up and returned it to his wallet.

"What, you embarrassed to be seen with me, angel?" He gave a mock pout. "Think you can do better?"

"It's not that I _think_ I can do better, it's that I have no _desire_ to do better." Aziraphale established and then, because Crowley got a look on his face that he wasn't quite certain how to interpret, added: "What I mean is..." He stuttered, feeling his cheeks warm with a blush that he was never quite able to reign in. Even after centuries attempting to do so. He took a moment to compose himself; choose the right words. "That's not the sort of matter that is of interest to angels. We have a higher duty."

Crowley twisted his lips to the side, unconvinced. "Mmhmm. You've also got a human body. Human bodies come with urges."

"Oh, hardly." Aziraphale gave a dismissive tut. "Perish the thought."

He allowed his indignation to fill the otherwise silent void just long enough to sufficiently make his point. A point which he then went and shot to shit, by asking:

"Do you... I mean does... your body sometimes come with... _that_?" It annoyed him that Crowley looked to be all too readily amused by his embarrassment. "The uh... the urges, I mean?"

Crowley actually mulled on this a moment longer than Aziraphale thought he would. "Hmm. Sometimes."

"Do you ever... or rather, _have_ you ever... acted on them?"

"What, with a _human?_ " Crowley's brow lifted curtly into the lines of his forehead, showing precisely what he thought of this suggestion. He scoffed. "Uck. _Perish the thought_ , angel. Why the heaven would I wanna go there? Nah, it only happens every once in a while. Seems to coincide a bit with planetary retrograde, I've noticed. Can sort it out myself when it does."

A thought which made Aziraphale feel more than just the slightest bit uncomfortable. "Please. I _hardly_ need all the gory details."

Crowley chuckled. "I didn't give you _any_ details. Come on, you don't have to act all unimpeachable with me, angel. Natural side effect of the corporeal condition, the urges. Ain't nothing sinful about working them out."

"Well, I wouldn't know." Aziraphale established curtly, straightening out his lapels and tidying his ruffled hair as best he was able. He wondered if the blush in his face would ever recede at some juncture. "Because, as I earlier mentioned, I _don't_ have them."

Crowley's upper body jerked with not at all cleverly disguised laughter. Aziraphale, on edge as it was, didn't much appreciate the reaction, nor the lack of effort put into containing it.

"Why are you laughing?"

"You know me, angel." He sighed, gifting him a genuinely fond smile that was much more pleasant than any of his more outwardly beatific ones. "Us demon's... we love a good sin."

This certainly confused Aziraphale. "What sin?"

" _Lying..._ " Crowley drawled softly. Knowingly. He tapped a finger to one of the buttons on Aziraphale's waistcoat, which was hanging by a thread and it zipped neatly back into place, adding pressure once more into the rise of his stomach. Crowley's fingers lingered on the overlapping halves of the waistcoat, on the pretence of straightening it. His warm breath lit flush to Aziraphale's ear, his words not nearly so confident as he might have otherwise wanted them to be. He was insecure at times and never the more when he might have broached the shallow den in which his vulnerability slumbered. "You let me know if you need any... _help_ if the urge takes you. _When_ it takes you." And because Aziraphale was staring back at him with something that wasn't quite altogether shock, he added: "None of Them would ever have to know. _You know...?_ "

"Oh, please. Don't be so ridiculous." Aziraphale snapped, taking Crowley's wrists and yanking his hands firmly away from him. "The very suggestion... you've quite certainly lost your senses!"

He started making his way back up the street, yanking and tugging and realigning clothing that in no way shape or form required attending to. It was easier to focus on this then to let his thoughts run freely.

"Where are you going?" Crowley drawled tiredly after him, ever so uniquely practiced as he was with effacing boredom whilst in the grip of otherwise more turbulant emotions. Aziraphale spun back towards him, his facial expression more readily akin to someone who had just received news that a wealthy relative was terminally ill and knew full well that they were the only person in the immediate family who hadn't been included in the will.

"I'm going back to pay the sodding bill!" He yelled, gesticulating back over his shoulder towards the lights of the not-so-distant cafe. Crowley, looking aloof and selectively uncaring as usual, twitched his cheek and returned his hands to the safety of his pockets.

"A'right then. Might see you later for a night cap. Cheerio."

He sauntered off into the night, passing a hand lazily back over one shoulder as he went. Aziraphale watched him go, feeling more confused by the moment as to just what strangeness had transpired between them.

He thought it a very unfair thing, really, for Crowley to suggest that he might simply 'act' on his urges. Yes, he had been lying when he said that he didn't have them. Of course he did. Much fewer and further between than humans and linked more intrinsically with an Angel's inherent, natural capacity of love but they drifted in on the tides all the same. He was never quite sure what to do with them.

Crowley had obviously figured it out. Little surprise there, he was a demon. He didn't possess much in the way of shame.

It was different for Aziraphale. Of course, he was no fool. (Though others might disagree and vocally, at that). He'd been around a very long time, he knew quite well the process by which humans alleviated the urges. But it always seemed to him a kind of obscene, impure thing, far from Heavenly, so to speak. And so he had never attempted it. He supposed that may have been part of the reason he equated so much pleasure with eating. An unconscious means of satiated unmet needs by burying it under delicious quantities of gourmet food.

Crowley too had his own unique set of pleasures. His mischiefs. His pranks. His oft uncharitable attempts to drown ducks and choke them with too large pieces of bread that he refused to render down to safe gobbling up size. But he had clearly accepted his human bodies limitations and found a means to satisfy its biological demands. Without want of going out and finding a human partner with which to do it.

It came as something of a relief to Aziraphale that Crowley had not stooped to such a thing. He liked humans, he'd often said so, but minimalistically at that. He reminded Aziraphale a little of a person whom, having confessed to being a dog person, was then forced to live their life in the company of a roomful of cats. He didn't like them quite as much as he liked dogs but he put up with them all the same, just with no true depth of affection. Certainly not enough affection to want to have sex with any of them.

Aziraphale felt another blush warm through his neck and encapsulate his cheeks from below as he pushed open the door to the café and stepped up over the stoop.

Was that truly what Crowley had been insinuating? Sex?

 _How would something like that even work?_ Aziraphale wondered and then quickly banished the thought as it attempted to spill over into something that would likely send him to blushing for weeks on end. He approached the counter, putting on his most contrite and magnanimous smile as he made his apologies for rushing out the way he had and, as was his custom, leaving an extra large tip as means of an apology.

It was a moot point anyway, Aziraphale knew, having made his amends and contented as such to return back to his bookshop but a few streets down. _Urges or not, I_ cannot _act on them. It would be impossible. They come part and parcel with feelings of love and those feelings of love come, more often than not now, with Crowley._

And Crowley was a demon. A demon who very well may have loved him just as much in return but that was irrelevant.

The differences were irreconcilable. There was simply no bridging the immeasurable, unseeable but ever present divide that fell between them. He had told Crowley once, so many years back that he ' _went too fast for him_ '. He wanted to reach a place which Aziraphale knew, full well, was unreachable.

And of course it didn't matter whether any of 'Them' were to find out. That was hardly the point. The physicality of any sort of relationship was always secondary to the emotional aspect. Crowley, it seemed, for all his puff and pomp, was always just teetering on the edge of acting something out, of saying something _more_ , of _asking_ something more. His pride was his enemy and one which Aziraphale was honestly quite relieved to have in his own corner. It prohibited Crowley from speaking out, for risk of looking like a fool, for being made vulnerable and potentially small and weak and foolish and that was something he could no sooner abide than he could with being labelled ' _nice_ '. He would do nothing, _risk nothing_ , until Aziraphale moved first.

Oh sure, Crowley might make his little insinuations here and there. But he would be certain not to make it appear as though he were in any way invested in them. There were times though, especially when his feelings were heightened, that he seemed to almost tremble with an internal ache, from so much intense and convoluted depth of feeling pressing sharp edges into the corners of his soul. When his eyes and gaze took on that hint of genuine desperation, underpinned by an unheard yet plaintively resounding plea for Aziraphale to just... grant him _something_. Some reassurance, some clarity, _something_.

But Aziraphale couldn't. Not then. Not ever. Crowley was Fallen. And no matter how much he might have loved him and could not envision a world in which he was not a part, it was impossible to then imagine a world in which they might be together.

It would have to be a world in which neither Heaven nor Hell existed.

Aziraphale might have wept then; for the dreadful state of it all. For the earth, for Heaven, for Hell and for all the souls betwixt and between and the unsurpassable chasm which had been carved between them all by the Almighty's hand.

All part of the ineffable plan.

He _might_ have wept, but he had arrived at the bookstore by then and he could see Crowley, already inside, having helped himself to a glass of scotch and dancing with a broom to the piercing strains of Renata Tebaldi. It was a sight quite enough ease his doldrums and, with that ever present warm-hearted smile returning to his face, he set once more aside the ineffable ponderings of the universe and relinquished himself to yet another evening of drunken discussions concerning the various utilizations of the 'I' sound, whether Crowley's new centuries resolution in learning how to play the hurdy-gurdy was time well spent (it wasn't) and why it was that Noah had seen fit to eschew the likes of griffins from the ark but provide standing space to tics and millipedes and the Cape Rain Frog. The scream of which, Crowley naturally attempted to emulate with such success that it resulted in a woman passing by the book shop to faint dead away, right in the midst of her trying to pick up a coin that was, for some reason, simply refusing to budge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I've been re-watching the show with a couple of friends who haven't yet seen it, and every time Aziraphale and Crowley are on screen together, just... doing what it is that they do, the non-stop chorus of 'Awwwww' was simply resounding. We all unanimously agreed that Aziraphale and Crowley are A.) In love and B.) Already an old married couple. Even my husband found it difficult to ignore the chemistry and I do believe he made quite the concerted attempt to do so. "They're just friends." Response: "Pfft. What have YOU been watching?"
> 
> Thanks for reading my lovelies! If you enjoyed, kudos are always the very much appreciated. Comments, even more so! No pressure either way :) 
> 
> Until next time and with all my infernal love,  
> ~Madammortis~ xxx ooo


	4. Or, where what goes around, comes around again.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel thought that there was nothing at all simple about what was going on. But a thought far worse, was the niggling suspicion that Lord Beelzebub was right. Though he was not an angel at all accustomed to questioning that which he believed to be incontrovertibly true, there was simply something about this entire situation which did not rest at all well with him. He glanced towards the cannister, mauve eyes narrowed as something written upon the senders label set to tickling at the corners of his contumacious brain.
> 
> He did not have long to think on it, however. And perhaps that was just as intended. The doors swung inward. And the first of the Contingency Team arrived...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens. I am just writing fanfiction. Do not sue, there is no point, I am a poor social worker and I have none of Crowley's imaginary money.
> 
> A/N: (Factoid 2) One that keeps me up at night is the question as to how Aziraphale actually got around to learning the gavotte. Did he in fact join a discreet gentleman's club, knowing that this was the only place he was likely to learn the dance (and if so, just how compelling did the gavotte seem to him if he simply had to have learned it) or did he just join a discreet gentleman's club and find out later that the gavotte was part of the deal?
> 
> And in so saying, just what is a 'discreet gentleman's club' anyway? Is this a club where men of the 1800's went to be discretely gay? Was Aziraphale aware of this? Or, assuming he didn't just join with the express purpose of learning the gavotte, did he join up thinking that it was a place that male type person's could be discreet about any number of things? Perhaps he thought that this was a safe place where he could open up about being an angel? And they all just sort of accepted this and humoured it as some manner of eccentric upper class quirk, and thereafter adopted him as their adorable fluffy haired mascot, who they would repeatedly try to get into the pants of. And Aziraphale would have been none the wiser of course; far too beguiled by the incomparable splendour of the gavotte.
> 
> Then I just imagine Crowley coming along and being like 'For fucks sake, he's about three minutes away from being gang humped and he doesn't even know it.' As Aziraphale just continued to dance away with that blissfully ignorant smile on his face, totally oblivious to all the men hunkered around him, huffing and panting with barely suppressed sexual frustration.
> 
> Keeps me up at night, folks.
> 
> But on a more serious note: I actually had to put a lot of thought into this chapter. Namely concerning the use of pronouns and secondarily as to some gender identity/genitalia based stuff. Anything I have written here is of course my own opinion, of which I have formulated after having had some serious thoughts on the issue, but should of course not be taken as cannon. I went with what I felt the television show had already mainly set in motion and tried to keep that flowing through as much as possible. Of course, there is no offense intended if I did in fact portray anything incorrectly or misused pronouns, etc. That is a fault on my part and does not at all reflect or embody any negative feelings towards any individual; especially in regards to how they may or may not wish to identify. I am one hundred percent on people being happy and comfortable at days end!
> 
> I hope that you enjoy the read and I shall see you at the end of the chapter with some further comments!

**~X~**

* * *

The thing about every great plan, is that it usually comes with a contingency plan.

The arrangement is universal and symbiotic. After all, you need something to fall back on if your first course of action ultimately goes tits up.

Take an outdoor wedding, for example. Weddings are typically planned months to years in advance. There's a lot of variables to consider. Whether the flowers match the groomsmen's boutonnieres. Whether you've picked the right song to walk down the isle to. Even those demonstrably unexpected happenstances such as the hoop in the brides train being inserted correctly, so that it does not sit at an uncomfortable, ankle knocking angle.

And in spite of the human race spending an enormous amount of time and resources on the insistence of needing _some_ idea as to what the weather might, from one day to the next, have in store for them, accurately predicting it is still quite a ways off.

For an outdoor wedding, you need to consider an indoor option. Just in case it rains. _This_ is a contingency plan. All good plans have one.

And the Armageddon, or _'The Great Plan'_ as most of those involved in its otherwise _not-having happened_ , was no exception.

Of consequence however, it did distinguish itself from most other contingency plans by remaining unknown to both parties to which it predominantly related: that of Heaven and that of Hell. The human race would be so lucky as to even accurately take a stab at the weather, so quite naturally they were none the wiser as to its existence.

But God knew, of course. It was She who had drafted the plan, after all. As to the reason's why, well, they were of course, as they have always been, ineffable.

Those who knew the Archangel Gabriel well might admit themselves surprised to find that these were considerations of poor consolation, even to one who might be considered blindly loyal of and accepting of the Almighty's mysterious workings. It was however, even so far as he was concerned, bewildering. Especially so, given that he and the select few of his Pantheon had been asked to meet with the foremost political representatives of Hell, to discuss it.

This very meeting was set to take place on Saturday the 2nd of February, in a public bar located in a shabby subset of London where Gabriel might have felt himself overdressed, if he was in any way shape or form insightful as to how he might reflect and or adjust himself so as to accurately reflect his environment.

He was in the company of the rest of the Celestial council; Michael, Uriel, Sandalphon and of course, one mustn't go forgetting the ever the more routinely forgotten about, Joel.

There was a reason as to why Joel was so unapologetically unrememberable. Though an Archangel, instated in equal standing to that of Michael, Gabriel and Uriel themselves, she was not often ascribed to active duty, employed predominantly as an in-house messenger.

It was she whom had received the initial summons via Epheme-mail and she, as such, who had been charged with personally conveying its dictation.

The five wary celestials were immediately and discretely chaperoned by a non-distinctive bar person into a back room which, in days past, might very well have been described as 'hazy with cigarette smoke' and 'vaguely smelling of lap dances long since dead'. Smoking laws and an underhanded facility conversion in the eighties had changed things, much to the particular relief of Gabriel, who verily detested the putrid stench of cigarette smoke (to say nothing of humans who removed their garments in exchange for monetary donations) and whom had been instrumental in having banned the practice from most every corner of Heaven.

It had given him some enormous personal satisfaction to have witnessed the earth bound celestial agent Aziraphale hunkering out by the front gate, in the days that he _had_ smoked, hastily trying to suck in as much of the cigarette as quickly as possible so as to not inconvenience anyone. It used to result in him coughing and spluttering even more awkwardly through meetings, which Gabriel found to be just as about enjoyable as it was deeply aggravating. Served him right really, for having taken up some an awful human addiction and further sullying what was already a considerably besmirched celestial body.

The five angels had barely time to make themselves comfortable let alone contemplate helping themselves to a peanut from the bowl centre table (though they would of course never _actually_ partake) before the door swung inwards and they were joined by the emphatically unimpressed likes of Lord Beelzebub, Dukes Hastur and Dagon and King Purson; whose main purpose for attending was to differentiate fact from fiction during the proceedings. Not that angels were known for their capacity to bandy bullshit but in matters quite so strange as this, there was simply no room for complacency.

"Lord Beelzebub. Lovely to see you again." Gabriel greeted, effacing a toothed grin which might almost have suggested that he genuinely found the situation to be quite as delightful as he was pretending it to be. He possessed even the angelic decorum (quite remiss on behalf of the fallen and all the best with which to remind them of it) to stand when his demonic counterpart had entered the room.

Beelzebub gave a tired, rather careless offhand glance towards Gabriel, though had little concerns with accepting the seat which he had pulled out for them.

Lord Beelzebub, for all their barely contained power, (secondary only to the actual Lord of Darkness himself), was... unassuming in appearance. Petitely framed, pale blue eyes set in a soft face and wearing a large fuzzy hat in the style of a characterized blow-fly, you would hardly suspect them as being supreme warden over most of Hell.

This outward façade was, of course, vastly different as to how they appeared below ground. All the demons had slapped their very best guises on for this meeting; though some did so more effectively than others. Hastur's scraggly toupee barely covered the symbiotic toad which was integrated into the rear of his skull. King Purson had a series of black spider like legs encasing his neck from behind like some manner of grisly choker. They twitched every once in a while as well, which was highly disconcerting.

"It iz a strange business, thiz." Lord Beelzebub remarked, tucking their short legs underneath the table and reclining in their chair such that you could sense the inherent nobility they possessed. Even whence clothed in such an innocuous guise.

"Can we get on with it?" Duke Hastur grumbled, twisting most of his lower face off to the side to form an unmistakable grimace. "Don't much fancy having to hang around with a cloud of puffed up poxy angels much longer than I need to."

"You're a fine one to talk about being 'puffed up'." Sandalphon commented, drawing back his upper lip to reveal a questionable set of gold inlays sectioned between each of his long teeth. "Looked in a mirror lately, have you?"

" _Enough_." Uriel said firmly, cutting off whatever remark Hastur might have been set to make in response. "We assume that you have received the same message as us?"

"Showed up right on top of my in-tray." Dagon, Lord of the Files remarked in her usual croaky voice. Her teeth, in spite of her best efforts to cap them, still appeared altogether too sharp whence compared to a human's. "Jumped right on off the top of the other files and bit me on the hand."

She held up a badly bandaged hand as evidence of the event; a bandage which looked stained and crusty and likely in desperate need of changing at least three days earlier. Michael offered a fulsome smile, underpinned by what was a plainly condescending undertone to the words which followed.

"An indelicate system. Have you actually considered switching to something more modern? An internal electronic mailing scheme, for example? I'm certain you would find it ever so helpful in running your operations more... efficiently."

"Bit damp to run live cables down below. _Love_." Dagon replied, twitching her nose in a gesture just as derisively in return. Beelzebub held up a hand; their expression quite as bored and unconcerned as ever but a genuine note of reproach evident in their otherwise sombre tone.

"Enough with the back and forth. It'z getting us nowhere. We've been asked to meet and so, we're meeting." They drummed their slender fingers on the arms of the chair. Glanced about as though anticipating someone else, previously unnoticed, loitering in the room. "Do we have any idea when this...?"

As though it had been perfectly timed (which of course, it had) the door swung inwards and a humble International Express delivery man, whom they might very well have recognized if it had been one of their 'respective departments', entered the room.

If Beelzebub's appearance was considered to be unassuming, than the delivery man's was positively sub-assuming by comparison. With a pinched, almost rodent like face, a figure much like that of a frog if you were to stand it up on its back legs and in possession of an aura, so thick with the threatening stench of the unfailingly chipper early morning riser, his was perhaps the singular most unusual addition to what was already a fairly kooky assemblage.

"Right you are. Sorry to interrupt your meeting but my instructions were _very_ specific. Have this in one of your good hands by no later than 6:15pm BST."

He took from beneath his arm a plastic cannister. A cannister which, at some stage of its transition, had acquired a particularly fetching sweat patch from the delivery man's armpit. He set it on its end, centre of the table and got to ticking things off on his clipboard.

Whilst he was crossing his T's and dotting his I's, the steward from earlier arrived back in the room and started to take drink orders. The angels of course had nothing, for they did not imbibe and had absolutely no desire (unlike a certain other perfidious once-angel) to 'tarnish the temple of their celestial bodies'.

The demons, however, were all up for a good tarnishing and made up for the angel's lack of enthusiasm by ordering a medley of drinks each so elaborate from the next, you might have thought them trying to outdo one another. Which they might very well have been. Gabriel thought that Beelzebub's choice of a chocolate martini and a bag of Bacon flavoured crisps to be especially unique, though it did serve the dual purpose of putting all the angels on edge from the open mouthed crunching that the chips were being subjected to.

"A dying breed, these old pubs. Right proper shame. Don't make them like they used to. Just, ah... need someone to sign for this." The delivery man held out the clipboard and pen in a vague ' _anyone can jump in_ ' sort of gesture.

Gabriel went to rise from his seat but was somewhat surprised to see both Joel and Purson step forward, almost as though in a trance and sign each of the two lines that had been placed adjacent to one another. Joel of course, by celestial feather and Purson by igniting the tip of his finger by his tongue. As the delivery man doffed his cap, slipped the clipboard beneath his arm and marched from the room, Michael gave Joel what might very well have been a censorious look, if coming from a more unrefined being.

"Do you know more about this than what you have made us aware of, Joel?"

Joel took the cannister, having granted Purson a very prudish ' _don't even think about it_ ' face and returned to the side of the room in which her own people were gathered. "Only that I need sign, along with... King Purson, as formal recipients of the cannister and its contents. It was in the instructions we received."

"Let'z get on with then." Beelzebub drawled, picking up their drink and taking a rather slurpy and vainglorious gulp from the contents. Leaving a brown milky moustache upon their upper lip in the process. It took everything in Gabriel's power to not reach across with his handkerchief and wipe their face clean.

"Indeed. I'm not certain how much longer I can tolerate the smell in here." Sandalphon said, with a distasteful sniff quite obviously directed towards Hastur. Hastur, who looked quite prepared to hurl the pearl onions from his martini at the angel.

"You got a problem with me, wank-wings, I'd be more than happy to take it outside."

" _NO ONE_ iz going outside!" Beelzebub snapped, for the first time that evening expressing something other than omnipresent boredom. They rubbed at their temples before waving a hand somewhat contrarily towards Gabriel. "My apologies."

"Quite all right." Gabriel responded congenially. They had something of a bizarre yet authentically shared empathy the two of them, fairly much charged with the wrangling in of their respective people and the understanding as to just how exhausting such an undertaking could be. "Joel. If you'd be so kind?"

Joel unscrewed the top of the cannister; though it took a good two to three goes before she managed to do so successfully. From within came a golden holy light, along with a soft chorus of intermingled voices, harmonising to some song never to be heard nor repeated the same way twice. A page unfurled, quite whiter than anything which could ever possibly be attained on earth. It held itself in the air high above the table, unaided by any visible force and the voice of the Almighty herself, not that of the Metatron, spoke. Reading aloud the words that were, for reasons best known only to itself, being systematically subtitled across the length of the page as it unfurled.

And so said the Lord:

* * *

**_"Greetings to all of those whom are gathered here; my Archangels Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, Joel, my Seraphim of might, Sandalphon. And greetings extended in the same love and reverence to my fallen children, in the names to which you are now ascribed; Lord Beelzebub, Dukes Dagon and Hastur and King Pursor; protector of truths and exfoliator of all untruths._ **

**_Hear now, the word of God; unequivocal, inarguable and categorically According to Hoyle, as so the saying goes._ **

**_I disclaim that if such words have reached you, that it has come to pass that the End Times, of which I'm certain you were most eager to partake, has not in fact_ _come to pass. I extend my condolences, for I understand well that such disappointment is difficult to process_ _and you were all so very much looking forward to it_.**

**_Into your hands, I hereby submit this: The instructions pertaining to the, as hereafter referred, Contingency Plan. The beginning stage, of which, has been subsequently set in motion by your attendance here tonight."_ **

Gabriel glanced at Beelzebub, who mouthed ' _contingency plan_?' whilst taking an indolent swipe at their frothy upper lip with their index finger. Having no answer as of yet, Gabriel returned his attention to the scroll.

**_"In the event that Armageddon does_ not _transpire and or/the anti-Christ denies his/her part in preceding events culminating in the ending of this world, the Contingency plan will be brought into quick and immediate effect._**

**_The outcome of the aforementioned Contingency Plan shall result in the what hence forth shall be referred to as the Apex. The process by which humanity, angels and demons alike are to be judged. With the Earth being a Libra and as such, requiring ever always an imperative balance, I declare as of this moment, all active celestial and demonic intervention on Earth, shall cease."_ **

There were quite a few exchanges of shocked expressions at this one. No one seemed to quite know what to think. Hastur was attempting to clean large chunks of violently yellow wax from his ear; obviously feeling that he had misheard whatever it was that God had just said.

**_"Humanity shall be divided down the middle, evaluated regards the balance of virtues versus vices espoused to their eternal spirit. This final push shalt secure the last remaining souls on earth to both Heaven and to Hell respectively, in preparation for the coming of this; the Apex._ **

**_Instigation shall occur one week as from today and culminate one year from now on the same date, at the same hour._ **

**_All souls shall be collated. And all shall be corrected._ **

**_As a means of ensuring impartiality in such conjectural matters, I have assigned to the undertaking of the Contingency Plan a team of freelancers; The Seven Principle Virtues and the Seven Capital Vices. During this time of procurement, I enforce, most stringently and with utmost severity, that under no circumstances are the Contingency Team to be impacted, influenced or otherwise waylaid by the efforts of any agent either affiliated with Heaven or Hell. Those of you who may attempt to do so, shall be contracted as such to receive incontestable and expedient routing by the agents of the Contingency Team. You shall find the stipulations pertaining to this pre-established contract as every angel, either remaining or fallen, to have signed when first initiating service to me. Damnation to Hell alters nothing in this regard. The contract stipulates compliance under most every circumstance._ **

**_In precisely two minutes, you will receive the first four of the Contingency Team. They will be thirsty, and so three waters shall be brought to the table, along with a pint of Guinness, Full Strength. Have them sign the attached documents and file these as appropriate. Subsequent contracts shall be forwarded to the remaining members of the team independently of your assistance._ **

**_These are my words. Go forth now and prepare your people in whatever ways you deem fit. Blessings be upon you."_ **

* * *

The scroll, having finalized its indentured message, coiled in upon itself and dropped to the table like a love letter screwed up and tossed aside by an anxious teenager. Four thick stapled documents, each appearing quite as identical as the next, appeared in its wake, before then dropping to the table and neatly framing the peanut bowl in a fanlike shape. The room was silent as a collective; angels and demons alike for once as equally gobsmacked as the next.

"Earth... divided down the middle?" Dagon spoke at last, her Gibson all but forgotten. Beelzebub, having processed quite a bit more of what had been said, tried to clear it up as much as was possible.

"From what it soundz like, this... Contingency Team are going to be assigned to earth and made responsible for dividing up all currently existing human souls." They gestured with first the palm of their hand and then turned it over, as though flipping a pancake. "No grey area. Black and white. The Vices and Virtues will influence each soul most heavily in the direction they already predominately lean. Exacerbate their inner most capacity for either good or evil. Strive them to act upon their inner most desires. Or lack, thereof."

"Condemn or elevate." Gabriel said, a feeling quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before settling hard and heavy in the walls of his human chest. For the first time in his entire long existence, he was positively, unequivocally baffled.

"Creating a perfect balance." Michael added, sharing much the same feeling as Gabriel. Hiding it perhaps only slightly better.

"So that no one side is stronger than the other..." King Pursor rounded off, slugging back from his Carlsberg with quite a bit more verve than he had initially demonstrated. Obviously wishing he had now ordered something stronger.

"It'z strange." Beelzebub murmured, having sat up in their seat much to everyone's surprise and setting down their drink so as to press their fingertips together upon the table top. Not a one of the dark council gathered could ever remember having seen their disgraceful superior so concerned. Exempting the time that the demon Crowley had been condemned to a bath of Holy water and had simply splashed about in the damned thing, still wearing his socks and asking for a rubber duck. "I thought that the Vicez and the Virtuez were long retired?"

"They were. _Are_." Gabriel confirmed, having experienced something quite as strange as his ongoing consternation was, in the form of rather wanting to partake of a human drink. He shook the thought aside. Polluting his mind and body with that muck was not likely to help matters any. "They're also very good friends."

Beelzebub nodded, having a vague memory of this themselves. "To make them work against one another... It doesn't make much sense. They're... complimentary. Two sidez of the same coin."

"A balance." Uriel re-established, in line with the Lord's early words. "Used to subvert the balance within a human's heart. Tip the scales in favour of one side, or the other."

Hastur scoffed a little, plucking one of the pearl onions out of his drink and crushing it messily between his back teeth. "'Spose the almighty thinks herself very clever with all that heavy handed symbolism."

"So what does this all mean then?" Sandalphon asked, his round face having lost its early scrunched up rictus of demonic distaste and now possessing something akin to, if such an emotion were readily available to someone like Sandalphon, fear.

"It means," Lord Beelzebub said, sinking back into their seat and bringing the last dregs of chocolate martini back up to their lips. "That your boss has royally _fucked_ us all. I'd put oddz at her being ticked over our handling of the Apocalypse and now She's decided to take matterz into her own hands and hire in these freelancers to do our jobs for us. Simply put, we're in timeout."

Gabriel thought that there was nothing at all simple about what was going on. But a thought far worse, was the niggling suspicion that Lord Beelzebub was _right_. Though he was not an angel at all accustomed to questioning that which he believed to be incontrovertibly true, there was simply something about this entire situation which did not rest at all well with him. He glanced towards the cannister, mauve eyes narrowed as something written upon the senders label set to tickling at the corners of his contumacious brain.

He did not have long to think on it, however. And perhaps that was just as intended. The doors swung inward. And the first of the Contingency Team arrived.

* * *

_**~Saturday, February 2nd - 2019~** _

_ **The Ritz - London, Mayfair...** _

Meanwhile, in a considerably more upmarket part of town, another angel and demon were, in direct juxtaposition to their once not-so-esteemed colleagues, actually _enjoying_ the company in which they kept. Partaking, as they did, of a particularly delicious post dinner _aperitivo_.

The demon, though resplendent as ever in the company of his most very favourite person, (if such a word could be applied to a demon with the usual dreary countenance of Anthony J. Crowley) was nevertheless feeling a tad uncomfortable, and had taken to squirming in his seat with a sulky twist of his lips, trying without success to rub at an unseen spot on his back.

"Must you keep fidgeting?" The angel named Aziraphale asked, having tolerated this rather unsubtle display for the better part of forty-five minutes. "It's rather taking all the pleasure out of this marvellously cheeky Courvoisier Cognac."

Crowley was every bit as annoyed by the fidgeting as Aziraphale, though admitting as to why would only likely cause the demonstrably self-conscious angel to likely sink down into his dinner jacket like a frightened turtle.

It wasn't simply that he was uncomfortable, but the fact that he _was_ uncomfortable had distracted him in his usual routine of actively enjoying watching Aziraphale imbibe. He felt quite as he was certain a human being must have felt, when their physical pleasure had been allowed to crescendo only to come crashing back down dramatically from the highest peak. It had left him feeling very pent up and annoyed and not at all sleepy, which he might otherwise have been in the same situation.

"Sorry. I've just got this... rotten pain in the... back." Crowley grumbled, slumping back into his seat, wincing at said pain and taking a rather belaboured sip from his cognac as a means of combating it.

Aziraphale glanced around surreptitiously before placing his own snifter down, ever so elegantly and setting one of his deftly manicured hands down upon the tablecloth.

"In... one of your..." He lowered his voice, though what point there was in doing so Crowley couldn't imagine, for the tables were all spaced generously apart (you of course paid for such a privilege) and their fellow diners had eyes and ears only for each other. " _Wings?_ "

Crowley grunted, a grunt which encompassed so many unforeseen layers of complexity and pushed his left shoulder blade against the back of the chair. "Think so. Something's definitely not right."

"Seems strange. Coming from one who is as... _meticulous_ with such... things as you." Aziraphale said pointedly, taking up his glass once more and sipping the contents with quite the respect that it deserved. Why Crowley insisted on throwing back the finest top shelf as though it were little better than bargain store mouth wash, never ceased to astonish and offend him.

"This coming from an angel who acts as though his wings aren't even there." Crowley shot back, annoyed with himself now for having sucked his drink in as quickly as he had. He glanced about for the poncy looking steward with the drinks trolley and placed a thought into his mind to stop what he was doing and come straight over the table to top Crowley's glass up. "Every time you unfurl your wings, a cloud of dust bunnies and silverfish come flying out. And socks, there was a _sock_ in there once."

"Well, it's easier for a demon who _persists_ in remaining unemployed to simply spend his idle hours attending to such things. I, on the other hand, have a business to run and all the distractions that come first and foremost with that." Aziraphale flashed his companion a look which might very well have been indignant, if the angel had not gone to some effort to be too haughty to properly efface it. "And you know full well it wasn't a sock. ...It was a handkerchief."

"Yeah. A handkerchief full of _food crumbs_. Let's not go forgetting that time you picked up wing nits as well."

Aziraphale looked quite so offended that if this was a bar in the more seedy underskirt of town, a lambent fly would have found the awning cavern of his mouth entirely impossible to resist. "I had been sitting in the clinic reception and rubbing wings with all manner of afflicted celestials! I hardly see how it's _my_ fault that any of their contagions saw fit to fling themselves off of their unhygienic hosts and espouse themselves upon _my_ body!"

By this stage, you're probably wondering just what on earth the pair are going on about. Allow me to explain:

Wings. Angels have them. Demon's have them. Ducks have them. Emu's have them, but don't utilize them very effectively. Penguins have flippers, but then they fall in love and mate for life, so they clearly have no concerns as to needing to fly the coop at any stage. Good for them. It's so rare to find decent old fashioned morals amongst the aviary world these days.

But back to angels and demons. Contrary to popular belief, the wings of demons are not entirely different to those of their angelic counterparts. They are, as many would deem appropriate, black in colour, whereas an angel's are of course, white. There were both positives and negatives to each. Black was slimming but tended to get hotter in the warm weather. White, as you can imagine, could look ethereal and translucent and holy. But they were a _bitch_ to keep clean. Never order spaghetti if an angel has their wings out at the dinner table.

Angels were notorious for having difficulties in maintaining proper wing hygiene. Wings required rigid upkeep and attention, which could be difficult as they were, especially for a once earthbound agent such as Aziraphale, tucked into a intangible sub-pocket located in the assigned body and could be seen only when consciously expanded. The same was true, of course, of Crowley.

Another area in which angels and demons differed however, was in respect to upkeep.

Crowley was, as Aziraphale so mockingly stated, fastidious with such things. Most demons were, as a matter of fact. Wings were a direct component of the spiritual body, rather than the earthbound one and as such, any injuries they received or any care they required, had to be undertaken manually, rather than by use of a healing spell.

There were Heaven and Hell based Wing Care Clinics whose dedicated staff were responsible in providing ongoing care and maintenance support to the wings of their supernatural clientele. Almost entirely reminiscent of a barber shop; rather with piles of old frayed feathers lining the floor and of course, much more space assigned between chairs. And naturally very chatty-cathy Wing Care technicians.

Perhaps they were more considerate in the Heaven based Wing Clinic; Crowley wasn't sure. But any demon with but an ounce of sense in their head, would sooner leave the wing care maintenance to their own devices, rather than subject themselves to the heavy handed torturous attentions of the butchers of Hell, who approached the task much as a sleep and sex deprived shift worker in a poultry processing plant, who took to the offending wing as though it were a chicken carcass in need of preparing for a Sunday roast.

Given the alternative, Crowley had, in short order, gotten to be very efficient at caring for his own wings. He did possess an innate knack so far as attention to detail went most ordinarily (it did see him through the vast centuries on earth with very little contention or question) and he actually found the process in caring for his feathers to be rather a soothing one.

He spent an inordinate amount of time tending to them; about once a week, in fact. And the effort showed, for there never was a finer set of such black, glossy and dandruff free wings to be found in all the preternatural corners of all the supernatural world.

Angels, on the other hand, were a precocious bunch, preferring to leave such matters to their 'experts'. Outsourcing these things, so far as Crowley was concerned, was little different to a human being popping down to the pedicurist and paying them to clip your own toenails. The angels had effectively deskilled themselves by refusing to learn what ought to have been second nature. And Aziraphale, much as his human body might have otherwise suggested, was no better.

As an earth based agent he had approached most everything such as he might have done so in Heaven. There were go to services on earth that would attend to such things, after all. A barber to trim his hair and sideburns and give his face a shave. A manicurist to file and style his cuticles. A dry cleaner to care for the clothes that he himself had actually _purchased_ over one-hundred and seventy years ago. Aziraphale truly believed that services were there to be utilized and did not actively buy into the self-sufficiency mind set that Crowley had long ago adopted, most simply as a means of 1.) Proving he could take care of shit himself and 2.) Not wanting to have all of his feathers ripped out one by agonizing one.

And, because Aziraphale most readily ascribed to the ' _only experts should do the expert work_ ' mentality, he always left his wing care maintenance up to the Heaven based Wing Clinic. This would have all been well and fine, if Aziraphale had been required to report back into Heaven on a far more regular basis than perhaps the... once or twice, two by monthly he had been known to do in times past. An intangible pocketed magical cavity between the shoulder blades was hardly a sterile environment; especially when left unaired for the better part of a few months. All sorts of bacteria could fester away, quite happily in that dank little nook; meeting, falling in love and having trillions of tiny baby bacteria that they would send off to school, where they too might meet and fall in love and then the cycle would disgustingly continue.

It would stand that once every other month or so, Aziraphale might be in possession of a set of wings so meticulously groomed, so incandescently white and splendid, that Crowley could do little more than simply sit and stare in wonder; having only a vague memory of what such a glorious set of wings was like. He of course fairly much bullied Aziraphale into modelling them every time he had returned from Heaven, because the sight was quite astonishing and even more so when one takes into consideration what the angel's wings had deteriorated to right before he was due to return to Heaven.

More often than not, Aziraphale's wings possessed all the charm, veracity and gossamer sumptuousness that might otherwise be seen on the wings of an aged fantail pigeon, long dead and half interred in the dirty puddle in which it had drowned. A dirty puddle that someone had ridden a push bike through. A pushbike with a dirty wheel.

It made Crowley literally shudder all the way down to the tips of his snakeskin clothed toes, simply to imagine what living with those filth festooned wings ensconced within your shoulder cavities must be like. Aziraphale however hardly seemed to mind, or even be _aware_ of his wings requiring anything other than the most minimal attention and simply got about, much as he always had, with a spring in his step and a smile on his face, which baffled the likes of Crowley who was intrinsically aware of even so much as one feather being bent out of place.

Which was perhaps why he had taken so much undisguised delight in having borne witness to the aforementioned _Nit Wing Incident_ ; which had occurred on a particularly warm summer's night in 1862. Being Aziraphale, the angel had of course tried his very best not to concern himself with the persistent and nascent itching which had suddenly lain claim to somewhere deep in his back. So deep in fact that that it was far beyond reach of his fingernails, even if they hadn't been so assiduously filed.

In a single mindedness so tenacious it would be an understatement to call it pig-headed, he had simply tolerated the near intolerable sensation for the better part of five weeks. At which point he was discovered, by none other than Crowley himself, backed up onto a support beam in his bookshop and thrashing about like a belligerent bear in a state quite as close to madness as the angel had ever been.

It marked the very first, in what had become a semi-sort of regular occurrence; of Crowley providing some much needed grooming assistance to Aziraphale. (Quite frankly he did it just as much for his own good as for that of the moronic angel's.) On that particular occasion, Aziraphale was in such a desperate state that he hadn't even protested, all but throwing himself face first and sobbing onto the floor and allowing the demon to strip him of his upper garments before applying pressure to the small of his back (hard enough to stimulate the wings into automatically unfurling) and setting to work on delousing the poor parasite riddled bastard.

Given the state of his neglected wings, it had taken Crowley over three hours total to bring them back up to something resembling an acceptable standard; having seized the opportunity to toss a few bucketful's of warm soapy water over Aziraphale (something the angel had not been expecting and was not in the least pleased about) and scrubbing the accumulative oil, dried skin and every other manner of gross infestation from the limp, grey feathers. They'd had a fight, the two of them, only some weeks earlier and Aziraphale thought it very kind of Crowley not to make mention of it, given that he'd had over three hours to slip a word in edgewise.

Crowley had not, of course, because he chose his battles wisely. And because, more importantly, he hated the feeling of being at odds with the only true friend he had. He'd still laughed at him, because that is quite simply what good friends do when one of them is splayed out wet and bedraggled upon the floor, in a puddle of fermented wing juice.

So, in response to Aziraphale's protestations, Crowley smiled, because he, unlike Aziraphale had borne witness to the angels near total collapse into slathering insanity and wasn't likely to ever forget about it.

"Yet another time I came to your unabetted rescue, angel." He teased, holding out his snifter for the steward to refill and giving another wince as pain went through him. Aziraphale, ever so finitely aware of Crowley's expressions and knowing this one to be for the most part unfamiliar, set his own glass down in a genuine show of concern.

"Ill-tempered snarking aside, are you quite sure you're all right? I thought you were looking a bit peaky all evening. ...Well, peakier than usual."

He ignored the unimpressed sneer Crowley shot his way and focused instead on his face. At the tiny droplets of sweat hanging suspended below his hairline. He reached out, not of course concerning himself with the trivialities of informed consent and placed the backs of his fingers to Crowley's forehead.

"You're clammy. And you have a temperature." He used both hands now to lift the demon's angular chin just enough to feel up under his jaw. "Your glands are up." He glanced briefly about before lifting the lenses of Crowley's glasses and taking a good hard look at his eyes. There were hooded bags beneath them, the skin having turned a fetching grey and the otherwise startling bright yellow of the irises now possessed the same sickly countenance of a sick infants excrement.

Aziraphale returned to his seat with a terse, reproachful frown. "You've probably got an infection. And here you've been sitting about all evening not saying anything. You're clearly unwell!"

"I'm fine, don't fuss." Crowley pointlessly advised. For if there was one of several things for which Aziraphale was most notably known to do well, it was to fuss. To the exception of perhaps only his wings.

"I just don't understand. If this is something to do with your wings, then why haven't you attended to it yourself?"

"It's in an awkward spot." Crowley said, reaching first one hand over his shoulder and then up underneath it and patting with his fingers to indicate the elusive _spot_. "Tried getting a look at it in the mirror, but it's on the back and up under the bone somewhere."

"How long has it been bothering you?"

Now Crowley was quite appropriately about to receive a taste of his own, bitter medicine. He might have blushed, if he had been the blushing type. "Couple of weeks now."

 _"Crowley!"_ Aziraphale did actually spill some of his cognac, so perfectly irritated as he was with the hypocrisy of the demon.

"I figured it would pass on its own! Not like I can get it checked out at the clinic downstairs anymore. Don't think they'd accept a walk in from a traitor."

Aziraphale softened at this, for he too was much in the same boat. Following the _Armag-Don't even bother_ , they had both been dishonourably discharged from their respective realms, on account of treasonous behaviour and directly impeding on would-be ' _Great Plan's'_.

Crowley, in fact, received the added bonus of a secondary summation relating to, though not limited by _'wilful murder in the First degree, behaviour considered to be in direct alignment with intentional acts of gleeful underhandedry, believing himself to be in possession of wits vastly superior to that of most any other citizen of Hell, of which evidence and or proof of which was entirely absent_ (a point which Crowley might well have argued if it had been him rather than Aziraphale posing as him receiving the summation) _and being, in general, a persistent and unapologetic lying, scheming, leather pants wearing, insufferable, putrescent twat-faced smarmy little wank-train.'_ (This had been largely Hastur's contribution to the proceedings but it seemed to make him feel slightly the better for having got it off of his chest.)

In so saying, it was not as though either of them were in any position to make use of the clinical applications of their respective realms anymore. They had perhaps been fortunate that neither of them had been in need of such services in all the months since the passing of the Not-quite end of the world. Aziraphale took up his snifter, knowing full well that he had a favour of which was quite overdue for repaying and supped back the last of the delicious nectar within.

"Well then, _I_ will take a look for you. Likely it will be an easy fix. Ingrown quill or something."

"Oh, you don't have to do that..." Crowley drawled, attempting, even as he just about melted into a sickly, sweaty pile of awfulness into his seat, to sound cool about the whole thing. Aziraphale, wondering why they even bothered to continue to play these stupid titillation games with one another still, raised a hand to beckon the steward over with the bill. He was tempted to ask for a container in which to pour his dinner companion, but thought the joke might very well go over the young mans head.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Feel free to leave a comment or kudos if you so desire. It is very much the lovely tobacco that I use to stuff my writing pipe and keeps me puffing happily away from chapter to chapter. As fanfiction is not the sort of thing what is generally funded on , we take what tiny victories we can :)
> 
> As always and with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	5. Or, in which Crowley and Aziraphale groom each other like spider monkey's.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well yes it could be." Azirapahle turned slightly, dropping his right wing down dramatically so that it draped over his legs. This allowed him to make eye contact with Crowley, which he thought a very important thing, given the slight bur of anxiety that had hitched itself to the demon's tone. He may have liked to questions things, certainly, but to profess genuine grievance of the matter... It must truly have been troubling him. "But Crowley... you must know that our powers, our abilities are linked so finitely with our immortal spirits that they simply cannot be unbound and desiccated. They're not checked out like our human bodies. Our powers are... well, they're part of our makeup. It's right there in the..." He twirled his hands, one about the other as though kneading dough in the middle of the air. "-stuff that makes us us! I can't imagine how it would be possible for our powers to ever just... run out."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens, nor any of its characters, nor anything of any real relevant and substantial importance. ... Except for a car and a house that I currently share with the bank. The bank lets me keep my clothes, shoes, dog and husband here, which is enormously beneficent of it, really.
> 
> A/N: Time for another random Good Omen's Factoid! Did anyone else notice, in the scene where Aziraphale and Crowley are sitting together in the café in Episode 2 and Aziraphale is jizzing his slacks over a piece of cake, that the lighting is noticeably brighter on the left hand side of the screen (where Aziraphale sits) and darker on the right hand side (where Crowley sits)? A nice little detail. Props to the stage design people :)
> 
> Thanks as always to every one of my lovely readers for reading, commenting and kudoing. Also, thanks to those of you who bookmark. … The bookmarking that is very likely getting very confusing with all this chapter dividing stuff going on. I do apologize, but I promise it IS going to make things better in the long run!
> 
> All right, enough blabbing: Here is the continuation on from the last chapter. Hope you guys enjoy!

**~X~**

* * *

** _~Saturday, February 2nd - 2019~_ **

** _A.Z Fell & Co's - London, Soho..._ **

Crowley somehow managed to drive the two of them back to Aziraphale's bookshop. An impressive feat, considering he had dissolved into something which possessed little more than the construct and density of treacle. Once there however, Aziraphale had to fairly much extract him from the drivers seat and steer his ever more somnolent body in through the front door. The door of which he customarily locked, bolted and drew the blinds down upon. All the more necessary, given what was about to occur.

"Here." Aziraphale said, halting Crowley's forward trajectory by grabbing hold of the collar of his jacket. He pulled him back and then further assisted him by taking off the coat and hanging it. He snapped a finger in the vague direction of the lounge settee. "Now. Shirt off."

"Suppose you _did_ buy me dinner." Crowley cracked, giving a dreary sort of grin as his fingers splayed haphazardly across the front of his shirt, slipping buttons from buttonholes whence landing upon them. It was a bit hit and miss, but he eventually succeeded and managed to drag his shirt back off of his arms and dump it onto the floor. Aziraphale snapped his finger once more, because Crowley had, now stripped down to his singlet, started to vaguely wander off to God... _someone_ only knows where.

"Sit."

"I'm just gonna grab a drink first." The demon protested, reefing open one half of the liquor cabinet and near about shearing the door clean from its hinges. Most likely for want of having hung all his weight off of it whilst it swung outwards. "Ya want anything?"

"No, thankyou. I would prefer to keep my wits about me." Aziraphale crossed into his back room, reaching underneath to extract the oft unused first aid kit, whose main purpose in life, it seemed, was to bump against his toes whilst he was working on the computer. He brought it out into the study nook, finding Crowley waiting patiently with a glass of Pinot Grigio in hand and looking about in obvious confusion as to where he was supposed to have conducted his sitting.

"Here." Aziraphale stated, placing the First Aid kit on the settee and then pulling up a plump, bean filled pouffe to perch before it. He flicked a finger at it and Crowley, plainly exhausted and having had quite enough of keeping it together, stumped over, swivelled on his heel and dropped down to not so much perch on the pouffe, but to splay, long limbered and ungainly upon it.

Aziraphale flicked open the twin clasps that kept the lid of the First Aid kit secure. Once he had set up the internal levels to his satisfaction, he lent his hand to the centre of Crowley's upper back. The singlet was warm and a little damp and rather than invoke disgust in him, Aziraphale was struck by an intense sensation of both love and pity. The poor creature was obviously ill and a genuine victim of his own inert nature to defy most anything that might in some way seemingly subjugate him.

"Unfurl your wings." Aziraphale requested, petting a hand gently to the slender indent of Crowley's back. He did not apply pressure, for he did not wish to force the act in any way. Crowley responded, his wings slowly fading into being, curling out from within themselves such as a spool of wool unbinds from about its central core. He kept the right one tucked in about himself, the larger feathers near the end, cupping about the floor by his booted feet. The left, he stretched out. As much as was possible in the somewhat craped study nook.

"Up there somewhere. Kind of off of where the bone meets the shoulder." Crowley gestured vaguely with the dangerously full wine glass, before bringing it back to his lips and sloshing in a generous mouthful.

It did not take long for Aziraphale to locate the source of the discomfort. After pulling back a couple of the longer feathers from the wing bone itself, he encountered just beneath, a tumescent, painful looking lump; roughly the size and shape of a tennis ball that had been cut in half. The membrane surrounding it looked painfully stretched and Aziraphale took note that there were no feathers growing in immediate conjunction to the growth.

"Ah. Here we are." Aziraphale had taken from the First Aid kit, a sterilized scalpel. He slipped on a pair of rubber gloves before poking the tip of the scalpel lightly against the bulge. "Got quite a nice old lump just underneath the wing bone here. I suspect that when you _unnecessarily_ plucked one of your old feathers, you might have done so a bit too soon. I think you may have a number of feathers that have attempted to grow right on back through the one pore just here and they've gotten caught up."

"Is it really disgusting and full of pus?" Crowley asked, sounding a little too intrigued for his own good. Aziraphale, against his better sense, reached over, took the wine glass from Crowley and stole a sip for himself.

"Let's just say that if it were on _my_ wing, you would be delighted." A statement quite unashamedly true. Crowley was one of those rare and wonderful people who seemed to enjoy such pursuits as popping pimples, picking scabs and ever much the same disgusting delights. He had even admitted to watching Doctor Pimple Popper on YouTube and being positively enthralled by one particular episode in which an enormous cyst had been filmed from such a close angle, you might have thought the camera to cop a back-spray. "I, for one, am _not_ delighted. Oh it looks like it's going to be an absolute gushy _nightmare_."

"You're a fine one to talk about disgusting. Back in 5 BCE, I bet you _opened_ your wings one morning and the ten plagues of Egypt popped out. Frogs and flies and death of the First Born son and all that, all just curdled up in your noxious old wing cavity."

Aziraphale actually chuckled at this one, finding it difficult, as it most usually was, to not be charmed by Crowley's sense of humour. "We both know full well who was responsible for _that,_ my dear. And you really ought not antagonize an angel who has a scalpel in their hand. Lest it slip and lop your head clean off."

"Hell of a scalpel it can take a head as big as mine clear off in one go."

"Yes, but you do have a rather flimsy, pencil thin neck." He smiled as Crowley turned and glared at him over his shoulder. "All right, yes, I've had my fun. Face forward now please. I'm going to need to drain the awful thing before I can get in there and remove the feathers. I'm afraid you're going to feel a sharp pain but I'll try to be as quick as I can. Be brave."

Crowley hissed, drawing his lips back sharply from his teeth as he felt the sting of scalpel slice through the painfully strained skin of his wing membrane. He fisted the fabric of the pouffe on which he was perched, feeling the interred beans splinter beneath his demonic grasp.

" _Be brave_ , dear."

"I _am_ being brave!" Crowley snapped, not at all being brave. Tears had formed a translucent film across his eyes and he had to reach up quickly to dab at the corners with the back of his hand. "You try sitting here with a big infected wing and see how brave _you_ are!"

The inflammation was so severe that it took little more than Aziraphale just nicking into it with the scalpel before the infected build up started seeping out. It was a very strange thing to think and to feel, but Aziraphale quite understood in that moment, just what bizarre satisfaction Crowley might have gotten out of doing and watching such things. As the pressure alleviated from the awful lump, Crowley's whole body slumped and he emitted a deep, resonating groan of relief. It occurred to Aziraphale that regardless of how disgusting the situation was, that it was fixing something. Fixing something which had been making Crowley feel awful and ill. The vile mixtures of putrid colour oozing from the incision he made, said all too clearly that this dreadful poison had been holding court inside of Crowley's earthly body and Aziraphale was overcome with a strong, overwhelming need to expunge it. So that Crowley could feel well again.

"Oh... _fuck_ that feels so much better already..." Crowley all but moaned, hunkered in over his raised knee, the wine glass hanging suspended from his limp fingers. He lifted his head long enough to pull his glasses from his face. Take another sip of wine. Aziraphale held a good wad of toilet paper up to Crowley's back; sopped up some more of the mess as it oozed out.

"It's like every colour of the rainbow in here. I've got red and yellow and green... and... oh, is that _black_?!" He sighed, more annoyed with the demon by the moment and pressed the paper harder into the base of the lump, to push more of the awful fluid to the surface. "It's coming out in hard lumps! You've left it so long it's started turning to _solids_! Stupid _stubborn_ demon! You knew full well that I owed you from that time with the nits and you still didn't go and say anything!"

"I'm sorry..." Crowley murmured, far too contented now to argue with the angel over... well, much of anything really. Aziraphale sighed, placed the used paper aside and tore another good wad from the roll.

"Never the mind now. But next time please say something! Before it gets to this stage!"

It took close to five minutes for Aziraphale to successfully drain the cyst, so that only small driblets of blood were now appearing. A rather impressive pile of grisly tissues had built up on the couch cushion beside him. Aziraphale pushed once more at the incision point, wiped away the blood and then placed the paper and the scalpel aside. He took then from the First Aid kit a sealed container, twisted the cap off and set it down within easy reach.

"There we are. Now, I'm just going to use the tweezers to excise the feathers." He picked up the tweezers, using his gloved fingers to move the still swollen flesh about. He could already see the black of the feathers which had been attempting to grow and all but curled in around themselves within the wound. He reached in, expecting Crowley might hiss or otherwise voice some manner of complaint and he was surprised to instead find him not reacting in the least. He just sat there, compliant, hunkered over his knees with his head down and his drink all but forgotten. It must have been painful but not nearly as much so as it had apparently been.

Aziraphale excised the first of the feathers. It was heavily saturated by blood and other fluids and the quill had snapped off from where another feather had likely grown up and pushed it out of place. He placed it neatly down into the container, returned the tweezers to the wound and continued extracting feather after feather after feather. There were seven in total, all bundled in around each other such as to form a veritable plug inside of the pore. Once they had been removed, Aziraphale used the point of the tweezers to dig a little deeper. They caught against something, scratched.

"As I thought. As the quills have snapped off, they've remained embedded in the pore." Aziraphale took up the scalpel again. "I'm going to need to open the incision a little wider; so I can reach in and remove the base of the quills."

"You do what you gotta do." Crowley said, voice muffled from where his face was buried against his knee. Aziraphale took up the scalpel, used it to extend the wound a little and gently widened the incision so that he could see into the base of the pore. The quills had all gathered there, crammed in like pins jammed into the same portion of a pin cushion. Aziraphale used the tweezers to work them out, one at a time.

Crowley enjoyed this part. It was a sweet pain, this one. A tender ache. He hadn't known just how bad it was until Aziraphale had started fixing it but now, he could quite literally feel the easement of each of the sharp quills as they were removed. As though something had been pulled tight inside of him, much the way your brow feels whence you relax it after frowning.

The feeling was linked, quite intrinsically to one of... pleasure. Pleasure he was quite certain Aziraphale would take offense at, if he had known. So he kept quiet. Displaced those soft little moans into his knees where needed and swallowed down yet more of his wine. Clenched his fists on occasion. Wishing vaguely that there could be something _more_ to it.

At long last, Aziraphale extracted the final splinter and placed it, alongside its other villainous companions into the container. Crowley wanted to look at them ( _morbidly as curious as always_ ) and so he passed it over and the demon stared, mildly impressed at just some of the mess that had caused him so much grief.

"Ouch."

"You are not wrong." Aziraphale confirmed, squirting saline solution into the wound and sterilizing it as much as possible. It was small enough so as to not require stitches and he placed gauze and a sticking plaster over the incision site; as a precaution against further weeping. "Lucky we got to it when we did. Any longer and you might have very well lost the wing."

Crowley gave a humorous snort, passing the container back over his shoulder. "Yeah. A one-winged demon. How stupid would that be?"

He felt so very much better and so very warm and appreciative towards Aziraphale for it. He leaned back on the pouffe, resting his head against the angels knees and stared up at him with a softness of expression that Aziraphale wasn't quite accustomed to.

"Thankyou. You're an angel."

"Well, a _once-angel_ , anyway." Aziraphale chuckled, petting his palm to the side of Crowley's face before climbing to his feet and scooping up all of the dirtied tissues. Crowley just about fell off of the pouffe, having dispensed so much of his weight against Aziraphale's legs and feeling rather settled about the decision to do so. "But you're welcome. Try and not let it get so bad next time, yes? Goodness knows I owe you enough for all the mending you've been required to do on my wings over the years."

"Speaking of which..." Crowley sat up eagerly on the pouffe, eyelids distending so as to form an expression most readily akin to an addict who had just realized they were due their next fix. Aziraphale, knowing full well just what it was the demon was to be dribbling after, dumped the tissues into the bin and raised both still gloved hands up in protest.

"No. Absolutely _not_. It's unnecessary."

Crowley continued to stare at him. Eyes wide, unblinking. Head cocked slightly to the side. Lower lip jutting out to form an ever so subtle plump hillock in the rosy flesh. Aziraphale felt, much as he had always done, the grip of his fingers loosening from the reigns which might otherwise have held tight his self-control.

* * *

Not two minutes later it was _Aziraphale_ what found himselfperched uncomfortably upon the pouffe, stripped to his undershirt and staring tiredly off into the middle distance as Crowley, cross legged on the settee behind him, pawed euphorically through his own tousled plumage.

"I swear," the angel said, wondering even as he did just how it had gotten to this stage. "It may not be that human beings actually descended from the apes, but I would hardly be surprised if _you_ did. You look just like a little capuchin monkey. You'll probably eat any fleas that you find."

Crowley chuckled, working his way through the longer feathers at the highest rise of Aziraphale's wing. "Got flea's, have you?"

"Not so far as I know, no. Certainly won't, after you've finished up back there."

Crowley was quiet a moment, reaching down and pushing his hands up slowly through the feathers so as to distinctly separate them from one another. He lifted near just about every one, checked underneath them and took to plucking at those that, in his opinion, needed to be removed. Scratched and pinched at spots he located on the membrane. Tutting every once in a while.

"You need to wash them more, angel. And haven't I told you to moisturize?" He reached down, scratching at the section of the wing known as the marginal covert. This was the thicker part of the wing which extended directly from beneath the shoulder cavity and contained a wider expanse of membrane than the other sections. Aziraphale had to confess, that it did feel awful itchy. Though he had only noticed it when Crowley had started scratching. "This bit here gets so dry, you _need_ to soak your wings more!" He tapped the back of the angels' head, causing him to open his eyes and realize, startlingly, that he'd actually had his eyes shut in the first place. "Come to my place tomorrow. You can use my bath. Give 'em a proper clean."

Much like a little bird bathing itself in a puddle, demons and angels were certainly encouraged to wash their wings in much the same manner. To wit, Crowley had arranged for the installation of a rather impressed bathtub in his luxury flat. Though not so much a bath, as a rather wide, rather deep, most definitely heated pool; in which he could submerge most of both himself and his wings and give the whole lot a proper going over. Aziraphale had partaken a few times (always on Crowley's insistence) and he had to admit it was much preferable to years past, when their only other option had been to go down to St James's river of a night time and dunk themselves in the freezing water. Fighting off ducks all the while, who appeared strangely aroused by the whole spectacle.

"Oh. No. I wouldn't want to be a bother." Aziraphale replied, not even entirely sure as to why he was declining the offer. It had hardly been a clandestine affair in the past, after all. Crowley had often sat in the bathroom and kept him company as he washed; perched on the sink and sucking back from whatever libation he'd lain his hands to at the time. It was a wonder as such, to Aziraphale, as to why the prospect suddenly made him feel so nervous.

Crowley glanced his palm right on back to Aziraphale's flock of white hair. "Since when do you care about being a bother? Come on, don't be stupid." He paused long enough to take a sip from his wine before returning his nimble fingers to the covets of the angels wings. "You'll pop round tomorrow. I'll set it all up."

"Fine. But no bubble bath this time."

"I'll just light some candles, dim the lights and put some Barry White on, angel. Toss a big old handful of rose petals in the water." Crowley murmured in hush tones. He laughed, though it hardly assuaged Aziraphale, who still couldn't quite put a finger as to why he felt on edge. He was rather glad when Crowley changed the subject. "Funny thing, though. Just the other day I was walking across the road from the bottle shop and this car comes barrelling along at me. So I... put my hand up. To stop it, you know. And the blessed thing nearly runs me over."

"Well I think it rather serves you right for crossing against the guard." Aziraphale stated, reaching his hand back and gesturing for Crowley to pass him his glass. He took a sip of wine before continuing, "Obviously your magic didn't have the intended affect?"

"Didn't even slow down. Not even a jot. Just about clipped the edges clean off of my shoes." He picked up the tweezers and plucked out yet another feather Aziraphale wasn't altogether certain required shedding. He watched it flutter through the air in front of his face before settling on the floor.

"Were you concentrating?"

"That's the thing. Never had to go to any effort before. Dead simple that spell. Takes more effort to pass a thought."

"It's strange..." Aziraphale mused, his brow forming lines so deeply interred you could tell with one glance that he was most definitely a heavy reader. Something had just come to him; something potentially worrisome. "Just the other day I was needing to place a book back on one of the higher shelves in one of my bookcases. I was... well, I rather didn't feel that the effort required to bring out the ladder was entirely necessary, so I used a spell to elevate the book into the correct position." He glanced over his shoulder at Crowley, his expression poised in that ever so lovely state betwixt embarrassment and knowing you ought really have known better then to have attempted something. "It landed on my head."

"Oh." Crowley responded, quite the more seriously than Aziraphale had expected him to take it. He thought the demon would laugh, which was why he hadn't mentioned anything about it as of yet. "That's a pretty simple spell too, isnt it?"

"Well, it's not quite in the same ballpark as grinding the brakes of a locomotive so that it doesn't render you a mess of broken bones on the road but yes. One I use regularly." He paused, meaning to be quite as clear with his inferred meaning as was possible when one was only inferring something. "No effort required. For the most part."

"Think it means anything?"

Aziraphale didn't much like the way that Crowley said this; as though he already knew the answer to the question which he had asked, but wanted to sniff out just how much Aziraphale might have known before announcing it. "I'm not sure. What do you suppose it might mean? From your tone I would assume you've already compiled some thoughts of your own."

"Not thoughts so much as... concerns." Crowley murmured softly, pushing aside some of the thicker clumps of plumage towards the central part of Aziraphale's wing and working the tweezers in there. Aziraphale flinched as another feather was unceremoniously plucked free; one he wasn't so certain had really required extraction at all. "My main one being... what if it... the uh, the fuck ups with the magic... what if it's because we've been... discharged?"

"Discharged?"

"Severed from our realms, I mean. What if our magic is getting weaker because Heaven and Hell have cut us off?"

It had already occurred to Aziraphale that there was likely to be some manner of fallout following their expulsion from their respective realms. But after more than six thousand years of living primarily on earth, he imagined that if their magic might be so easily afflicted by disassociation from their home lands they would have seen it by now. Crowley might in turn have noticed a significant impact on his powers when he had Fallen; from all reports most demon's magic, though warped, lacked nothing of the strength they might otherwise have wielded before.

"Oh I hardly think that's likely." Aziraphale replied, having already considered the aforementioned. Crowley, unconvinced, picked at something on the membrane stretched across the angels wing bone. He likely wasn't doing any more good back there, but he would continue to amuse himself with the picking and plucking for some time following.

"But it _could_ be a possibility."

"Well yes it could be." Aziraphale turned slightly, dropping his right wing down dramatically so that it draped over his legs. This allowed him to make eye contact with Crowley, which he thought a very important thing, given the slight bur of anxiety that had hitched itself to the demon's tone. He may have liked to questions things, certainly, but to profess genuine grievance of the matter... It must truly have been troubling him. "But Crowley... you must know that our powers, our abilities are linked so finitely with our immortal spirits that they simply cannot be unbound and desiccated. They're not checked out like our human bodies. Our powers are... well, they're part of our makeup. It's right there in the..." He twirled his hands, one about the other as though kneading dough in the middle of the air. "-stuff that makes us _us_! I can't imagine how it would be possible for our powers to ever just... run out."

"I'm not talking about running out so much as their just getting _weaker_ , Aziraphale." Crowley said with a slight frown. The frown and the fact that he was using Aziraphale's name, meant that he was serious. "Living on earth is a right laugh and a half, but I don't know how much fun I'll be having if my spells over... well, let's say at HSBC Holdings wear off and my savings account suddenly plummets to zero." He indicated a direct downward drop with the tweezers, making a popping sound at the end to light heartedly emulate a crash. "I'll be up shit creek without a paddle then. Lose the flat, most likely. No money. Nothing."

"Nonsense." Aziraphale glanced off to the side, wondering how he might best phrase himself next so as to not embarrass a rather easily embarrassed demon. Feeling a flush warm his own cheeks; for he felt there was something suggestive in what he was about to say. It was entirely heartfelt. And this was what worried him most of all. "You would... stay with me, of course. I'd never let you live out on the streets with all the ne'er-do-well's and... the loose women. I would take care of you."

And he smiled that ever so celestial smile, nose scrunching just as cutely as it ever did and with eyes that couldn't seem to help but dart to and from Crowley, as though he simply couldn't help himself. Now, if Crowley had been quite a bit more trusting than he was and perhaps a little more switched on, he would have taken this for precisely what it was; a door being edged ever so infinitesimally opened. A dead bolt being slid back.

But he was no fool, was Crowley. They had been playing this game a long time, the two of them and the end result was always the same. The door being slammed smartly shut in his face whenever he tried to get a foot in over the stoop. It got a little exhausting getting your hopes up after a while and so on this occasion, he didn't bother with it. Even when in the presence of that natural radiant warmth and goodness which seemed to eb and flow from Aziraphale quite as naturally as a flowers perfume.

"I'm not much for the idea of being a kept demon, angel." He said instead, which was quite true and also an effective means of permitting the angel to rescind on an offer that he would only come to regret in five minutes anyway. Which was why Crowley was surprised to have Aziraphale meet his eye, and to continue to push the point. He might have said it in a light hearted manner, but Crowley knew he would usually have backed off by now.

"You could help around the shop. Earn your keep."

Crowley couldn't help but blow a raspberry at this one. "Me, working in a bookshop? _Please_. Business would be out from underneath you in about three seconds flat. Besides, how would the both of us survive on just a bookkeepers wage?" He held aloft his dwindling glass of wine, swirling the golden contents about in the base. "All those little luxuries we've come to enjoy would no longer be available. No more dining at the Ritz. No more expensive thirty year old single malt. Might as well kiss anything with the word 'vintage' in it goodbye."

"You forget; I have _earned_ every pound I have, Crowley. None of my savings are compiled from magical underhanded dealings. I have a tidy amount saved up." Aziraphale smiled reassuringly, patting his palm to Crowley's knee and giving it a squeeze that sent warmth fluttering up through the base of the demon's belly. "We would be fine."

" _You_ would be fine, sweetheart." Crowley said, firmly enunciating so that there would be no arguing with him on the point. Making it clear in no uncertain terms as to where he stood in respect of this 'plan'. "I'm not about to sponge off of you."

_I couldn't do that to you. Not take your money when you've rightfully earned it. When you've worked hard to earn it. It'll be my own fault if our powers run out and I'm penniless. I won't make you pay for my arrogance and negligence._

"Well, what else are you going to do? Just slink on out into the gutter and die?" And Aziraphale did something he couldn't remember ever having done before; not at least in the spirit of which it was intended. He took up Crowley's hand and squeezed it firm between his own. To him, it was a strange thing, for angels never usually required the aid of a physical connection when expressing their love. You probably weren't doing your job very well if you had to.

It was simply that... well, he had felt in that moment such an overwhelming sense of love and affection for Crowley, that he wasn't able to sequester it to his gaze and his voice alone. Perhaps it was a very human thing, he wasn't sure. But Crowley wasn't pulling away either and that had to be a _good_ thing.

"Crowley..." He said, caressing his thumb over the ridges of the demon's knuckles. Noting the way that the yellow eyes, much brighter than they had been earlier, observed their trajectory. "My dear, where is all this even coming from? You had a near miss, that doesn't mean that our magic is going to disappear and leave us high and dry. And even if it did, don't you think that I would want to help you get back... well, get _onto_ your feet?" They chuckled lightly at this one. Distracted. They'd shaken hands before yes, but this... this was something quite different. They were poised as though in the grip of a spell. Finitely aware of the other. "I wouldn't let anything happen to you. No matter how proud you pretend to be."

_It's not pride, angel. Guilt. Guilt and arrogance. For letting myself believe that the magic would always be there. That I would always have the luxury of doing whatever the Heaven it is that I wanted._

_I never wanted to have to make you pay for that. And I'll be blessed if I'll ever just let that be okay._

"I'm just saying that we _need_ to be careful. Maybe start cutting back on some of the more frivolouss miracles. Definitely avoid throwing too much energy into anything so much as resembling a _true miracle_. Don't want to run the risk of being stranded in human bodies... no powers no..." He gave an offhanded sort of twitch of the lips, distracted. "Well... lots of things to consider. Isn't there?"

Aziraphale thought on this some, not quite clear as to what it meant, as Crowley placed the tweezers down, freeing his right hand. He started to very slowly caress the back of Aziraphale's wrist, trace the vein lines in the backs of his hands. Up over his knuckles and onto his nails. Being as simply curious as Crowley had always been. Aziraphale however, felt his body respond to this quite outside of what his mind had logically determined it to be. Very much in line with the not oft experienced Urges, which gripped him once every so often.

This felt more insistent however. It took a hold of his lungs and clenched, so as to stutter the breath that he had been taking in. Sent a flush into his neck and cheeks. Traversed a path down through his loins.

 _Of course_.

What Crowley had meant was that if they were to lose their powers and were forced to live as humans, that they would invariable need to choose a gender by which to exist. Certainly there were any number of differing variations and interpretations to which humans viewed gender and sex in these modern times, but if they themselves did not wish to be singled out, they would need to ascribe something physical in the least.

It was not a matter of overly great concern so far as Aziraphale went. He himself had lived with male genitalia for many thousands of years now. Ever since he had made the decision to start imbibing human food, it just made sense to go 'all the way' and allow his body to do, unconsciously, what any other human body would do. It took less thinking on his part. Of course, he could return alcohol to the bottle when he needed to sober up, but this was not the case of all liquids and certainly not of solids. He might have looked a poor customer indeed if he were to order some delicious meal, be seen to be eating it and then magically 'regurgitate' it back onto the plate. He presented as a male in all other regards, so why bother with simply manifesting the appropriately assigned sex organs if and where there might be a chance of it being exposed?

It had in fact been his time in Rome which had cemented his decision to do so. He had grown tired of the constant ' _swapping in and swapping out_ '; having to keep on top of just what was going on ' _down below_ '. Not to mention the up-skirting. Because he was so very blonde and clean and otherwise healthy in appearance, he'd been the unfortunate recipient of many male advances at the time. Not unusual, in and of itself. It was Rome after all. But Aziraphale really rather preferred not to run the risk of being exposed (in every sense of the word) and had made the decision to live entirely as a human male from that point on.

Crowley, on the other hand, was a little different. He had _not_ spent the last six thousand years on earth living exclusively as a male. There had been times he had in fact, presented as female. Aziraphale never thought him very convincing when he had but Crowley had rather sort of chastised him for the appraisal, stating that the state of the body did not accurately reflect the form of the spirit.

He had certainly struggled with this state of earth based identity for far longer than Aziraphale had and though he had started leaning predominantly into presenting exclusively as a male in the 1600's, he still never invested entirely in the affixing of male genitalia. At least, not consistently, as Aziraphale had. He did not eat as much as Aziraphale did, for one and when he drank, he might have then switched in whatever was required to rid his body of the urine but Aziraphale felt he rather treated this as a slot machine. He'd just go with whatever. Otherwise, he remained for the most part, genderless. The times that he did switch in male sex organs, he was constantly chasing after Aziraphale for advice on the matter. Never seeming entirely comfortable with them. And yet refusing all the while to wear looser pants.

If Crowley were to lose his powers, than he would be required to make that choice once and for all. And Aziraphale wasn't quite sure that Crowley would ever truly be at peace with whatever form he chose. He liked to shed his skin. Frequently. The thought of being trapped and of not being able to shift in one way or the other would likely have been overwhelming to a creature whose very nature had been changing since the dawn of human time.

Aziraphale connected the dots, only of virtue of the fact that his own long since ascribed genitalia, seemed to be taking notice of what was going on between his and Crowley's hands. Now this did strike him as odd, for the movements so far as he could tell were very tender. Why then was there this element of arousal?

One of the many nuisances of male sex organs. They were incredibly poor at discriminating. He could quite understand why Crowley would prefer not to be at the mercy of them.

"If worse comes to worse... and you do have to... choose..." Aziraphale swallowed a little, his throat feeling dry. He wished now that he had stopped long enough to grab himself a drink. He might have gone to get one now but he rather felt it better that he remain present for Crowley; who was concerned and vulnerable and likely very confused. "Choose whatever makes you most comfortable. The form in which you will be most happy."

"I'll be fine." Crowley murmured, giving that careless, crooked little smile of which Aziraphale found so strangely endearing. "Don't you worry about me, angel. So long as you're around, I can cope with anything this world or the next throws at me."

Aziraphale thought this quite the sweetest thing and didn't at all know what to say. He was so flustered that he took to stammering, staring off to the side. He felt Crowley lift his hand, turn it and place the knuckles against his lips. He planted a firm kiss against them, unceremoniously, with great intent. Quick, sharp and to the point. Released him then and gestured with his fingers to face front again.

Without comment Aziraphale turned, bringing his hands back into his lap and allowing Crowley to start fiddling about with his wings again. They sat as such for some time. Without awkwardness. Simply contented. The movements of Crowley's hands had taken on something of a mediative quality and Aziraphale felt very soothed by it. He might have nodded off right then and there but then Crowley spoke again and ruined any chance of that.

"Hey... what do you think about you and me going on a trip together?

"A trip?" Aziraphale glanced over his shoulder, his voice teasing. "Not off to Alpha Centauri, surely?"

" _No_ , of course not! Just round the world, visit some of the old haunts. See how things have changed. How they _haven't_ changed." Crowley paused, murmuring as he sucked back the last remaining mouthful of wine from his glass. He set it back on the side table with a somewhat heavy and careless 'thunk'. "You know. Just have fun. Reward ourselves a little for a job well done in averting the Would-be-end-of-all-things. Let the world reward _us_ , frankly."

Aziraphale was still poised in that very tentative stage where he dare not permit himself room in which to wonder as to why why he felt particular things where Crowley was concerned. _Why_ the suggestion of taking off together on a holiday, exclusively and entirely in the company of one another, made him feel apprehensive, for example.

There was an odd sensation in his chest; similar as to what he might ascribe to the body preparing itself to be attacked. He felt himself in a sort of danger, though what danger that might be he couldn't say. Only that to say yes, even if there was a part of him (a very large part, if he was being honest) that felt warm and tickled and all too eager to agree to the offer right then and there, he would be saying 'yes' to far much more than just a simple holiday. If he had been opening the door but a crack earlier than this... _this_ would be throwing the damned thing wide open. And was he truly ready for that?

"Well, I..." He smiled sweetly, differentially over his shoulder towards where Crowley sat just out of sight. The smile was as beautiful as it always was, but the corners trembled slightly in evidence of his internal struggle. He did not wish to smelt Crowley's obvious enthusiasm on the matter and wished instead to have some room in which to take a step back. "I'll... I'll think about it. I really well."

He thought Crowley might have been hurt by the subtle rebuff, (for it was hardly the first in what was in fact, a long line of Aziraphale saying 'no' to the demon) but if he was offended he didn't show it. Didn't show much of any sort of reaction, really.

"Take all the time you need. Got plenty of it, after all." He leaned over suddenly, put his arms around Aziraphale's shoulders and gave him a brief squeeze. Slapped his palm to the centre of the angel's chest before rolling sideways on the settee and up onto his feet. "Well, I'd best not be burning the midnight oil. Might be making tracks."

"You're leaving?" Aziraphale asked, a little disappointed to find that he was sooner to be without company than expected. It was hardly late after all. "Won't you stay for another drink, at least?"

Crowley, in the midst of slipping his shirt back on, gave Aziraphale a sad smile. The type which said he wished that he had known better than to ask.

"Look, angel... I know it's not getting late. But if I stay any longer, I'm worried I'll say something you're not ready to hear." He loped to the coatrack, looking to be in a much improved state than he had an hour or so earlier. Took down his coat and fed his arms through the sleeves. Jerked up the collar so that it would provide a windbreak to his neck. "So, be at mine tomorrow morning. Not too early. Might treat myself to a sleep in. I can do that now. Novelty, eh?"

"Yes. Yes, of course." Aziraphale said, curling in his own wings and tucking them back inside of the intangible nook beneath his shoulder blades. He had to admit, they did feel infinitely more comfortable than they had earlier. "Goodnight."

As expected, Crowley was already halfway out the door, waving a hand back over his shoulder and calling 'Night' just seconds before he disappeared out into the street. Aziraphale, pulling his shirt back on over his singlet, was left puzzled by what he said before leaving. But not as puzzled as he went to such great strains in pretending to be.

Heaven and Hell were no longer at their backs. The constraints which had been imposed upon them had been severed and they were now free to act on their own whims, to chart their own course. To do, for the very first time in all the time the earth had existed, as they themselves wished to do.

The world was opening its doors to them. The question remained, what might Aziraphale let in, if he were to open his own doors in return?

For with a storm behind them, such doors are never so easily closed.

**~X~**

That same night, not six square miles from the small ski village of Canazei, Italy, a meteorite struck the earth; carving a really rather decent trench into the snowy slope of the nearby mountain. The meteorite was approximately five feet in width and diameter and had been tracked by NASA now for some years prior to it entering earth's solar system. It was believed to have originated from a dead planet in the Triangulum galaxy; a vastly uncharted area of space of which little information had been gathered.

A group of astrophysicists set out to gather samples from the meteor. Three were subsequently killed in an avalanche, which in turn buried the meteorite in its entirety. One survived, unharmed. He passed back through the village of Canazei on his return. What followed was a never before seen and unprecedented event, in which the townsfolk turned on one another with such unmitigated hostility and violence, that it made world news. Of the two thousand plus persons who resided within the town, seventy were pronounced dead before the day was out.

There was nothing on the news pertaining to the deaths of the scientists sent out to gather samples of the meteorite.

There was in fact nothing in NASA's files at all pertaining to the existence of the meteorite.

As for the man who survived, well... there was no record of him either. Birth records that might have once existed simply ceased to be. A wife, waiting expectantly for the return of her husband, found herself, as she had always been; unmarried. Aged parents who might have once remembered having a son, suddenly had no recollection of his ever having existed. Photographs shimmered a moment, such as a distant mirage and expunged from within that which they once might have captured.

The Man who Never Was travelled West on foot, complicit to the summons which had brought him here. He had plans of his own and scores that he wished to settle. These would have to wait. He would bide his time that while longer.

After sixty centuries, what was another year after all?

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It took me so very long to figure out what I was going to do in regards to Aziraphale and Crowley and their 'trouser' situation. In the end, I couldn't really bypass the whole 'Aziraphale eats so much food and drinks so much stuff, I can't imagine he would find it very practical just magicking on some genitals and the like when...evacuation was required'. As Gabriel said, food is considered to be 'gross matter' so I imagine normal human expungement would be required if an angel were to partake. Human body after all. Would it not just seem silly and ostentatiously stubborn to not have sex organs in that sense? To run the risk of not blending in? For what, really, at days end? Hence why I went this route with Aziraphale.
> 
> As for Crowley, well, I honestly do see him as being fundamentally male but then I struck upon the whole idea of the 'shedding of the skin' and figured that in not ascribing genitalia exclusively that it was a means for him to sort of maintain some weird semblance of control. He is a little more gender fluid than Aziraphale and has lovely feminine energy (which Aziraphale quite obviously has as well) and this is not just on account of the hip swinging thing. This is rather more the nature of the energy he gives out.
> 
> This is just what I settled on, after having it rack my brain savagely the entire time I was writing this chapter. I would not have even debated the topic with myself and just given them both male genitalia if not for the novel and Gaimon's confirmation on angel's being sexless. Or... genderless, rather. Hard to see David Tennant strutting around and try and claim it as a sex free zone. And not to combat the cannon of that statement (they are, after all, not my characters) but I simply had queries as to a number of things concerning sexual presentation and as such concluded as I did conclude.
> 
> Because in the same vein, I have absolutely no concerns about two men falling in love and having sex with each other. I do believe that as an angel and demon that Aziraphale and Crowley are sexless, but there would not be an issue with the two of them being in male bodies and still finding a means to be together in those bodies. It wouldn't necessarily make them gay, on account of their being two 'genderless' spirits but it also wouldn't matter a jot if it did! At the end of the day, they are two beings who love one another and who gives a toss as to how they choose to be together? As I stated much earlier in the piece, there are some relationships and circumstances that simply defy definition.
> 
> Also, I want to be clear that I did not choose to present Crowley as being predominantly genderless because it is a sort of concession to his perhaps being in a quote-unquote traditionally 'female' role in contrast to Aziraphale being in the 'male' role. (Having chosen to adopt male genitalia). I reinforce, I do not care for gender specific roles. And in this case particularly, I lean in favour of fluidity. And I believe that both characters are the SAME. Earthly presentation does not impact what they quintessentially are; two souls who love and care for one another deeply.
> 
> Okay, rant officially over! Thanks for joining me on another journey everyone! If you liked, feel free to say why or comment or share or whatever it is you feel like doing.  
> Take care out there in the world my lovelies and until next time, with all my infernal blessings;
> 
> ~Madammortis~ xxx ooo


	6. Or, in which there is an apple. One BIG symbolic apple.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale all but sprang back from Crawley as a group of people entered from behind a copse of trees in the garden. Of course to suggest that they are people was not entirely accurate. 
> 
> They were thirteen, in all. Neither Angels nor demons. Much older than both, in fact and, if rumour was to be believed, originated as sort of... sub-stock of... whatever it was that She herself came from. Kind of how a CEO might bring some of their loyal sub-managers over when taking charge of a new organisation, that sort of thing.
> 
> They were the Principle Virtues and the Capital Vices...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens and make nothing in the writing of this fanfic apart from personal benefit.
> 
> A/N: Sometimes I wonder, whether the horrible goop that Hastur was catching in his bucket is actually sewerage run off from Heaven. After all, Hell is supposed to be in the 'basement' of the preternatural 'building' what the realms occupy, right? In which case, the demons really have devolved into the roles of would be 'shit-kickers'. No wonder they're so pissed off whenever a pipe breaks!
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading and following and commenting and kudoing! I appreciate each and every one of you who takes time out of your day to spend a little time with this story of mine! I very much hope that you enjoy this new chapter :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~The Garden - 4004 BCE~** _

"Got saddled with clean up duty, did you?"

The Angel Aziraphale, assigned Guard to the Eastern Gate, looked over from the seed pods to which he had been tending and set eyes upon the demon Crawley; perched in somehow obstinate fashion upon a stone what appeared to have been conjured for that purpose entirely. He was turning an apple over in his hand, admiring, it seemed, the way in which the sunlight reflected upon its shiny surface.

"Crawley." The angel greeted; courteous as ever but still ever so slightly perturbed in the presence of his hellish counterpart. They hadn't known each other well at that stage, you see. But what little they _had_ had to do with one another, had been surprisingly congenial thus far. "Isn't there a head office you ought to have slunk back to, by now?"

Crawley (for this had been his name in the beginning, long before he had taken to questioning vowels) smiled; a smile which apparently prefaced his intent to tease, for he followed it by saying:

"Thought you might get lonely without someone to talk to. All the other guards have been called back to Heaven, haven't they?" His brows lowered now, to form a straight line. His expression one of curiosity, marred by what Aziraphale was starting to recognize as this creature's ever so subtle means of emotional manipulation. "Why are you still here, angel?"

Aziraphale broke away some of the dead fronds of the tree to which he had been tending and cast them into a pile he had formed nearby. He passed the sleeve of his robe, once white, now stained, over his sweaty forehead. It really _was_ thirsty work. Except that angels did not drink, of course. Not outside of Heaven, anyway. And even then, only as a matter of absolute necessity.

"Oh, it's um... it's Aziraphale, actually." He replied, carefully avoiding feeding too much information back. It made sense, of course. Crawley was a demon. The enemy. Anything Aziraphale was to let slip, either accidental or otherwise, would be swiftly carried back to the powers of be in Hell and likely cause him far more issues than any he might have landed himself in, simply by virtue of him being _him._

"Well I might have known that, if you had bothered to introduce yourself earlier." Crawley snorted, a shortcoming of manners which Aziraphale internally chastised himself for. Any self flagellations he might have distributed were put on hold however, as he observed, with intense shock, Crawley taking a large, audacious bite out of the apple he had been earlier admiring. He continued speaking, sending chunks of fruit flying from out between his lips as he did. "It's a long name, isn't it? _Aziraphale_. Rather hard to wrap your mouth around. Suppose its got to be better than 'Crawley' though, doesn't it?"

Aziraphale, feeling quite as though his human body was about to experience its very first cardiac related event, flapped a finger at the apple as though this in itself was enough to prohibit what was occurring.

"Oh... please tell me that's not one of the apples from the... the you know... _that_ tree?!"

"Unbunch your feathers, will you? It's from another tree. Not like I need to know the difference between good and evil, anyway. Already got that one down pat." Crawley took another bite of the apple, gave it a good chew and examined the mark he had made. Juice dribbled down the sides of his mouth, taking stock of its situation below his chin. "You ever had an apple, Azirafell? An earth one, I mean?"

" _Phale.”_ Aziraphale almost snapped, catching himself just soon enough for it to not sound quite as rude as it might otherwise have been _._ He took out what unheavenly annoyance he was nursing by snapping away some browing palm fronds."And no. Obviously."

"Why's it-" And here, just so as to further annoy what was already a struggling angel, Crowley took to mimicking his clipped tone. _"'-obviously'?"_

"Because angel's do not imbibe. You should remember that yourself. From before your..." Aziraphale cast his eyes skyward. "...transgression."

The demon did not often blink, he noticed. Which seemed appropriate, given that he could assume the form of a snake when he so desired. Still, Aziraphale found that the intensity of Crawley's eye contact made him feel nervous in ways that he couldn't quite put his finger on. It wasn't for want of the fact that his eyes were much too big, much too yellow and splintered by a thick black vertical line for a pupil. They seemed to _change_ from time to time, he had noticed. Though relatively short so far had been their acquaintance, he had witnessed a shifting of the iris; whereupon it might sometimes be smaller and not disimilar in size to what Aziraphale's might be. Other times, such as now, the yellow encompassed the entirity of the eye, save the pupil which reached now from top to bottom, like a thick, black splinter.

But more than that; it was in how... unashamedly the demon took to meeting his gaze, what he found to be unnerving. He seemed to demand the very same attention in return and his were eyes that pierced so deeply Aziraphale fancied they might very well have scraped the very surface of his soul. It was hypnotic, in its way and the angel thought it very wise to not allow himself to maintain eye contact for any consistent length of time. It might prove difficult to pull himself away.

"My 'fall', you mean." Crawley said, driving his gaze with such force that Aziraphale felt rather like two thumbs were being pressed directly into his tear ducts. He looked away, for the effect of it caused him to feel rather dizzy and returned his attentions to yet another of the millions of plants assigned to his care.

"Whatever you choose to call it. Why are you even eating that anyway? So far as I know, you... demon's, don't need to imbibe either."

"Because I wanted it." Crawley hissed, taking obvious pleasure in ripping another good chunk from the apples side and swishing it about his mouth with relish. "The day was warm, my mouth was _bone_ _dry_ and boy does a _juicy apple_ hit the spot. You should give it a go. No one could argue that you've earned it. Back busting work, that."

It was at once a cruel and clever choice of words. To align _bone dry_ and _juicy_ in the one sentence. How long had it been that Aziraphale had been stationed here, all but ripping the leathery wad which had once been his tongue away from the insides of his equally dry cheeks? Just about tearing the skin with every forced extraction. He wasn't about to die of thirst any time soon, of course. Angel's could maintain their earthly bodies without need of sustenance.

The problem, it seemed, was that no one had bothered explaining that to the bodies themselves and Aziraphale's was patently confused as to why its inherent biological needs were not being met. It made earthly life extremely uncomfortable; as no manner of convincing on his part seemed to have the intended effect of getting the body to _behave._

Since being in the garden he had experienced such wonders as 'sunburn', in which the earths sun saw fit to sear painful red marks into his skin, which shortly thereafter would attractively blister and peel. He felt thirst and hunger and a suspicious painful wrenching of his internals which he suspected was his organs attempting, in spite of Heaven's strong regenerative magic, to shut down. His throat ached much of the time and his feet were sore and he had been sweating and the sweat had started to make him _smell_ and his wings were started to get groddy and flecked by leaves and dirt and any other manner of nasty what-nots that saw fit to adhere themselves.

None of this had of course ever been tested, on a long term basis, by any other angel of Heaven. The earth by that stage was only ten days old. Aziraphale had been there for all ten of them and was, so far, the only angel who had. He was breaking new ground. And the ground he was breaking, suggested that angels' probably were not so well suited to long stints within the mortal realm on nothing more than a diet of pious alliteration and Gods omnipresent love.

It seemed obvious to him that Crawley, having been there nearly so long himself, was having a much better time of things. His wings looked clean and well attended to. His skin had taken well to the sun and had adopted a bronzed hue, which Aziraphale suspected he would never have any chance of ever coming close. He appeared chipper and nourished. If one were to ignore the tangles of leaves and twigs which had affixed themselves to the curls of his long, red hair.

"Oh, please. Haven't you caused quite enough damage with all your tempting?" Aziraphale said, naturally resisting (for what else was an angel to do when it comes to the wiles of a demon?) and abandoning his garden duties for the time being. He crossed to where Crowley was sitting, angled himself so as to pass by his wings and set his fingers to work on the knots of his hair; fetching out pieces of twig and the like and dropping them onto the ground. 

The demon of course, let him do as he pleased, for there was never anything in all the worlds quite so mother hen, as an angel. The fact that Crawley was fallen meant nothing so far as Aziraphale was concerned. Perhaps it rather strengthened his need to fuss.

"What? You afraid God's going to throw _you_ out of the garden next?" Crowley scoffed, wincing as Aziraphale pulled a very erstwhile twig out of a particularly obstinate knot. "Ow! Easy."

"Well, I can't really help it, you ought to see what your hair looks like from the back! What have you been doing; rolling around in the bushes?" Aziraphale sighed, teasing out the knot as best he could, before moving his fingers over to untangle the one beside it. "Between you and me," He added, lowering his voice for what little it was worth, "I'm not entirely sure I would mind if the Almighty _did_ throw me out of the garden. This new 'rain' thing has certainly helped but there's still an awful lot of foliage to care for. And it has been terribly hot, as of late."

"Better you than me. Can't think of a worse way to spend your time. Taking care of plants. You know what would help take your mind off of things?" He raised the apple slowly into view over his shoulder, bringing his other hand around so as to gesture reverentially towards it. Harmonizing all the while as though the apple were some Holy relic of Heaven.

Aziraphale couldn't quite help but smile. Say what you will but the demon was rather funny in his way. And there were Angels of Heaven who were not nearly so fair minded as Crawley had shown himself to be thus far.

"Honestly." Aziraphale tutted, giving Crawley's hair a good tug just so as to teach him a lesson. “Haven't you got somewhere better to be?"

"Somewhere better to b-?" Crawley might have spun about just so that Aziraphale could fully appreciate the look of disgust on his face but his shoulders were swiftly pushed about to face front again. "Where the Heaven do you think I've got to go that's better than this? A dead camel's arsehole would be better than where _I've_ got to go back to, angel!"

"I would have expected your superiors would have wanted you to check in by now." Aziraphale worked out another bur and scraped what looked like dry mud out from a tangled knot. "Slap you with a commendation for your 'great victory'."

"Time will tell who it's a victory for. And call me crazy, but I'm in no rush to wiggle my arse back downstairs and spent my idle hours staining soggy paperwork with ink blots and jamming my finger into leaky pipes. It's nice up here." Crawley stretched out his wings, tilting his head back and resting his palms on the rock. He closed his eyes as Aziraphale took to scratching at his scalp, pulling back on the long strands of hair so that it near ran as smooth as water. "Got to get my fix of sun while I can. Speaking of which, ya never did answer me before. Why are you still hanging around? Surely the Almighty's not just making you tend an empty garden for the forseeable future?" He opened his eyes, gave Aziraphale a both upside down and simultaneously sidelong glance. "Did She find out about the sword?"

Aziraphale held a finger to his lips, shushing the demon with urgency. "Shhhh! _No, She didn't find out about the sword_! Not for want of you blabbing about it!" He started sweeping his fingers down through the base of Crawley's hair, separating the locks. There weren't quite so many knots left now. "The surrounding world will start to grow fertile due to the rains and the seeds from the garden will spread to cover the earth. I need to keep things maintained for as long as possible. And then, once the human race has expanded enough, I've been asked to watch over them as they grow. Provide them with some positive guidance. And the like."

"How fun for you." Crawley said sarcastically, crossing his legs and taking another bite from the apple. He looked every bit a creature who plainly expected his purpose in life was to be pampered. "Any idea how long that's going to take?"

"Eight hundred years. Give or take a decade."

Aziraphale all but sprang back from Crawley as a large group of people appeared from behind a copse of trees in the garden. Of course to suggest that they are people was not entirely accurate. 

They were thirteen, in all. Neither Angels nor demons. Much older than both, in fact and, if rumour was to be believed, originated as a sort of sub-stock of... whatever species it was that God herself belonged to. 

In the creation of the known universe, the Almighty had employed the ongoingservices of these mysterious individuals. Kind of like how a CEO might bring some of their loyal sub-managers over when taking charge of a new organisation, that sort of thing.

They were the Principle Virtues and the Capital Vices. Charged by the Almighty with the unenviable task of divining, extrapolating and implementing the multi-faceted framework which formed the core of every sentient being. It was they who had been responsible for first assisting God with the creation of Her Angels (a task vastly overrepresented by the Virtues, one must say). 

The Vices had been responsible for the creation of the Hellscape and whom had shaped the transformative sulphur which sculpted, decimated and corrupted the souls of those angels who transgressed beyond those values instilled within them by the Virtues. All those angels who rebelled were thrown down and warped into those states then deemed considered to be 'opposing'; a perhaps to be considered 'extension' of their already failing Virtuous states.

The Virtues and the Vices were then subsequently tasked by God to create those beings who would populate the earth; the human race. A considerable feat, given the precision by which they had been required to balance out the inordinate and unprecidented mathematical equations with which to achieve a nominal balance of components, which might still result in some degree of natural autonomy. 

It had been ten days so far since they had rolled their product onto the metaphorical factory floor. It had taken seven for a certain 'demon' to have successfully thrown a wrench into it.

Though not of angelic stock, you would be forgiven for assuming they were. They had four wings a piece; the larger primary set were of the same white as Aziraphale's had been and the smaller lesser wings were as black and as luxurious as Crawley's. All were dressed in a robe of similar style to Aziraphale's, though grey in colour. None of them looked to be in a particularly good mood.

It was the one named Industria who had spoken first. Her name might later be known in English as Diligence. And though a Virtue, she appeared particularly pissed off, all but driving her large, bare foot through the pile of Aziraphale's cast off dead branches and turning them to ash in the process.

"Time enough, one might suppose to work out all the expected kinks of the exponential inbreeding that's about to occur." She added, coming to a stop by the angel and the demon and crossing her muscular arms in a way which might be considered the very definition of passive aggressive. "Now that we no longer have the luxury of introducing variant models into the mix so as to avoid all the genetic muddling and... sexual intermingling of direct siblings and... webbed fingers, excess body hair and _Almighty_ knows what else. Eyuck."

"Oh, spare the small talk, darling." The one called Luxuria said, brushing long fingernails back through her extravagant floof of curly black hair. Eyes the colour of a martagon lily flickered between Aziraphale and Crowley with a hint of dangerous appreciation which made Aziraphale feel rather the more uncomfortable than he felt he needed to be. "Now which one of you sweet dears is Crawley?"

"I'll give you a hint, _darling._ " Crawley all but purred, straightening up so as to better gift the collective with a look so positively smarmy it made Aziraphale flinch with precipatory concern."He might very probably be the one with the funny eyes and the black wings. Just a thought."

"So it's you!" Snarled the one named Superbia, who (by modern standards) appeared to be some bizarre amalgamation of a moviestar, politician, CEO of a multimillion dollar conglomorate and, quite frankly, anyone who sings into a microphone and sells the songs they probably haven't even written for a lot of money. And then use that money to buy a jetplane, stupid gold jewellery and respect that they haven't earned.

This strange Chimera of a creature, was not happy. Their earlier snarling at Crawley might have been proof enough. But in case this was to have proved too subtle, they did indeed have a backup plan. This involved all but storming up to what had, until precious moments earlier, been a largely relaxed and contented demon (head massages and sunshine tend to have that effect) and striking him so forcefully with the back of his ring laiden hand that it pitched Crawley clear off of his rock.

"You're the slimy little shit who got her to eat the apple, aren't you?!" Superbia shrieked, casting their foot into the demon's side with such force it shot the air clear from Crawley's human lungs.

The violence of the act shocked Aziraphale. He was no stranger to it, sadly. He had fought in the Great War and though never having landed a killing, or even near the fateful blow, had sent quite a few of what had been his former colleagues into the Hell portal for subsequent damnation. 

That was not to suggest that he ever enjoyed, or even approved of such a thing. Pain was abhorent to bear witness and it would not have mattered at all who was the recipient. The fact that Crawley was a demon was immaterial.

He was concerned as well that Crawley might have fought back. Demon's were renowned for their temper after all; just one of those things the sulphar had exacerbated when they had passed through it. But Crawley surprised him in having a rather the contrary reaction. He didn't waste even a second in being shocked over what had happened but instead, scrambled straight to his feet and shot behind Aziraphale, pressing himself in tight against the angel's back as some manner of protection. Naturally, Aziraphale spread his wings out, prepared to shield him from any further harm.

"Now, there's not need for _that!_ " He said, greatly upset and feeling just the slightest twinge of anger align to his words."He was simply doing the job that was asked of him!"

"Why are you shielding him?" Asked Luxuria, managing somehow to maintain an incomparable air of both magnetic attractiveness and boredom at the same time. It was a skillset of which the modelling agency in twentieth century times would extol with such natural effeciency.

"I'm not shielding him! Rather he's using _me_ as a shield!"

"And you do it so well." Crawley murmured, his no doubt swollen face still pressed to the space between Aziraphale's wings. He had a firm hold of the back of the angel's robe and was pressed in so tight it might very well have taken a real miracle to have prised him free. He was using the handholds in much in the same manner as one might have held the straps of a shield and was steering Aziraphale slightly from side to side, anticipating where the next attack might be coming. It was an unnecessary thing, for Aziraphale had no intention of stepping aside and leaving the demon vulnerable. It was simply not in an Angel's charter.

"Now, let us all try our best and stay calm." Aziraphale urged, holding up both hands as a means of placating the situation. He wasn't certain, but he felt as though the demon might have been trembling. It did not seem likely, however. "What appears to be the problem?"

"The _problem,_ Angel of the Eastern gate," So contributed Invidia. "Is that we distributed a fully tested, bug free product into the marketplace and the next thing we hear, is some greasy little Hell tic has talked it into corrupting its system."

"Hey." Crawley said from over Aziraphale's shoulder. Quite unable to help himself, it would seem. "I wasn’t the one put the tree there. You got a beef with it? Take it up with your precious Almighty. She's the one who dangled the lure in front of their faces. I just told them how to reach it!"

"Slipped the hook right on through their lips, more like." So said Avaritia.

"It was their choice to bite _._ Free will. Isn't that the code you were most _proud_ of? Their capacity for autonomous thought?"

Superbia, their human features turning a rather fetching shade of purple, made as though to push on past Aziraphale and get to Crawley once more. The Angel fluffed out his wings to even greater breadth, sending out a shower of sand and dirt with his efforts. The anger was now undeniable, the feeling of being somehow responsible for the disgraced being at his back; whether the demon was using him or otherwise.

"Do _not_ strike him again! I shall not repeat myself!"

There was something incontestable in the angel's tone. Something which transgressed the soft, warm and somehow nervous exterior he presented. Which harkened back to the Principality, whom had weilded such considerable power at the Lord's behest. This might have certainly been a wholesome, compassionate and loving creature beyond compare but he was in the same breath, one whom could very easily stand his ground where required. It was precisely the reason as to why he had been appointed as Guard of the Eastern Gate in the first place and was a fact that ought not readily be dismissed.

The one named Humanitas remembered this and so guided Superbia back before then approaching himself, hands pressed together to form a non-threatening, yet indisuputibly and somewhat contestably phallic shaped pillar with her hands.

"My dear chaps, you must understand." He said, in a voice which might one day, when they were to be invented, be compared to the tolling of church bells. "We spent ever so much time assisting the Almighty in Her task. Designing Her perfect subjects in accordance to Her great vision. Instilling them with the optimal balance of varying traits, emotions and so on and so forth. It was no small task and no meagre amount of effort."

"and now because of you, the breadth of our project has been expanded..." Added Acedia, looking as tired and as bored as they ever did. They might truly have been as irritated as their counterparts but it was not in their nature to go to any great pains in expressing it. "the Almighty has requested we roll out the project from scratch. ...there goes retirement.... our pension - whoosh - right on out the window..."

"Well, to be fair... your contract really was a rather short lived one. All things considered." Aziraphale gently reminded them. It was solace ever so poorly received, though he hadn't expected they were ever likely to cheer up. Gloom hung over their heads like a querulous toad guarding its slimy egg pouch.

"You have any idea what it's like to create a being whose components balance out in perfect symmetry, boy? Took moons longer than the two of you'll ever know. We earned our retirement. And now because of your _friend_ here -" Gula spat on the ground near Aziraphale's feet, though he had quite obviously been aiming for Crawley, who remained smugly out of reach. "- we got our work done cut out for us, _again_."

"We're hardly friends." Aziraphale tittered nervously, as Crawley, not appearing the least concerned by the insinuation, poked his head through the angels feathers just long enough to hiss at Gula's moustached face. "He is a demon and I am an angel. That's about the long and the short of it."

"A demon that you, most interestingly, persist in shielding..." Temperantia commented, lifting a curt brow. A remark which Aziraphale rather did not feel the need to deny so much as provide context concerning.

"Well your colleague struck him! In the _face_! _And_ kicked him. It was dreadfully uncalled for!" He straightened up, a posture of which came quite natural to Aziraphale when he was espousing what he felt to be the very true and very proper manner in which an angelic composed itself. Timid though Aziraphale might have seemed in some respects, he was courageous when it came to his morals. "I may very well be an angel and he may very well be a demon but I do _not_ condone ill behaviour towards anyone, regardless of where they hail. You must _always_ act with kindness, in spite of how anyone else might choose to behave. And to attack someone in such an unexpected and unprecidented manner is worse than cruel! It is inherently _wrong_." His wings had started to feel the slightest bit strained from having to hold them at such an angle but much as he had that first time in the rain, he refused to leave the demon without shelter. "Those who worked at the side of the Almighty should know better than anyone."

"You must understand that they are disappointed." Said Patientia, whose soft eyes said all too plainly that they understood where Aziraphale was coming from. Their ability to perceive anger was naturally inhibited, given who and what he was. But their compassion for their colleagues meant that they quite assuredly could reflect what it was that they were feeling and empathize with their situation. "We worked _hard_ for this. And now, we must spend the next eight centuries on earth, following the fledging human race and aiding in the development of their own far more advanced and differential perspectives of right and wrong and good and evil. It is far much more beyond what any of us could ever have expected."

"Or ever could have expected to do in an uncontrolled environment. The amount of variables that this world possesses alone... How the Almighty expects us to reach a satisfactory conclusion with all these compounding factors alone, well!" Superbia pointed at Crawley, whose large luminous eyes had chanced another glimpse out from between a gap in Aziraphale's feathers. "I hope you're happy. Because of you and your people's stupid _bullshit_ prediliction for causing stupidity, I'm going to be spending the next eight hundred years strolling this barren arse turd of a world, running diagnostics on a bunch of misfiring, virus riddled human beings!"

"Please do try to calm down." Humilitas urged, taking hold of Superbia by the elbows and leading him to walk the enclosed area in circles, whilst he waved his hands superfluously at his face in some meagre attempt to calm himself.

The demons eyes narrowed from between their bracket of white feathers, one brow sliding up to form what might be considered a questioning expression.

"Wasn't there supposed to be fourteen of you?" He asked; a query which set the Vices and Virtues to all staring at one another awkwardly. He persisted nonetheless or perhaps moreso as a result _of_ said awkwardness. "Yeah, I'm sure there were. Fourteen. Seven and Seven. You lose one on the way here, or something, did you?"

Invidia paused a moment, her eyes lighting suddenly with the dawn of recognition. "Oh yes, now I remember you. The Almighty warned us about _you_. She said if you started asking us questions, that we were to do this."

And as one, the Vices and Virtues turned on their heels and walked swiftly out Of the clearing. Superbia, clearly still practicing patience that they simply were not in possession of, made a gesture with their middle finger that would one day become the standard colloquial invitation for one to go forth and to copulate with oneself. 

When the last trailing inch of grey robe had disappeared from sight, Crawley saw fit to step out from behind Aziraphale; having to all but prize his little demonic meat hooks out of the back of the angels robe.

"You know if I actually had feelings, they might have hurt them just now."

Aziraphale couldn't help but notice that the demon's fingers appeared to have a slight tremor to them. He had set them to the mark on his face; a painful raw looking cut from where a ring on Superbia's finger had grazed him. The fingertips were indeed trembling. 

Aziraphale could not quite recall a time in which his own hands had taken to shaking. He thought perhaps the demon to have been more upset by the largely unprovoked attack than he was otherwise letting on.

"Well... that was certainly something."

"Yeah." Crawley murmured, staring off absentmindedly towards the gap in the grove where the Vices and Virtues had left. His eyes looked especially big and, to Aziraphale, especially lost. There was something vulnerable in the uncertainty of his gaze. Something dimuniative which made it seem as though he was so terribly in need of protection. Which was a silly thing to think about a demon, really.

"Are you all right?" Aziraphale asked all the same. Because he was nothing if not kind.

"Who just rounds off and hits someone with a big old knuckle duster like that?" Crawley asked, doing his utmost to sound flippant about the matter. Aziraphale noticed that he was favouring his stomach with the hand currently not nursing his wounded cheek. "Seems a bit harsh, don't you think?"

"Yes, it really rather was. But I dare say that they were cross with you." He reached up, taking the demon's hand away from his face and passing his palm over the wound on his cheek. He did the same to Crawley's midsection; an act which might have taken him by surprise if it simply wasn't the sort of thing he had come to expect of the strange angel. Since shielding him from that very first rain, Aziraphale had proven himself to be an exceptionally compassionate and venerate being; whose empathy extended far beyond the expectations which might be readily paraded by any of his ostentatious kin. "You can't blame them, really. So far as all the contracted work undertaken at God's behest, the construction of the Human Engine was by far the most gruelling and complex of them all. Most of their team took compassionate leave at some point or another. The calculations alone which were required to thread the infinitesimal cords and synapses of the human mind and to thread instinct and learned behaviour and the like, well...!" He gave the demon a kindly look; a look which the demon for some reason felt the overwhelming need to turn away from. "It took over a thousand years for them to write the blueprint alone, Crawley. You can't imagine they would be pleased that you systematically undermined and rewrote their software all by want of a few clever words."

"Ohh... so you think my words are clever, do you?" Crawley said, turning back now with a pleased smile. A smile Aziraphale ignored as he set the tips of his fingers to the demon's angular jawbone and tilted it from side to side; making good and certain that the injury was satisfactorily healed.

"Perhaps too clever for your own good. Strange that you didn't stand your ground. I thought a demon would be all too eager to go to fisticuffs."

"'Go to fisticuffs'?" Crowley snorted. " _Please._ Never was much of a fighter. More of a... conscientious objector, if anything.”

"How in Heaven does a 'conscientious objector' end up throwing in with a rebel faction and fighting against the armies of God?" Aziraphale asked, naturally sceptical.

"Well I didn't know it was going to be an actual war when I got swept up in it, did I? I rather thought it a light hearted lampoon at the oft times questionable decision making policy of a dictatorial agenda ruled over by a, for the most part unseen, unreachable, largely unknowable supremicist. I thought at the most we might chant something, wave some placards, glue ourselves to the floor, that sort of thing. I had no idea the knives were gonna come out. Or flaming swords, rather.”

"You must have had _some_ idea."

Crawley gave him a strange look at this. A look which suggested he found something left wanting in what Aziraphale had just said. As though he had... disappointed him in some way. "Must, huh?"

"Yes, you must! A demon doesn't simply get thrown out because he got caught up with something on account of ignorance! There must be more to it than that."

"So you don't have even the slightest doubt that your precious God could act out just because some folks bothered to-" He leaned in close to Aziraphale's ear, wagging his tongue from side to side in his mouth and emitted a low, sullen sounding hiss. "-waggle their tongues?"

" _I_ believe, that everything happens for a reason." Aziraphale replied calmly, refusing to rise to the bait.

"Oh there's always a reason, angel. Just not all reason's are black and white." Aziraphale felt something drop into his hand. It was the apple Crawley had been eating. "But what would I know? I'm nothing but a Fallen, after all."

Crawley was walking away now, sort of swishing from side to side as he went. It seemed apropos, Aziraphale thought, much in line to the sinuous coils a snake might make as it wound its way along the ground. Each coil jutting out wide before swooping back in dramatically. Crawley's hips it seemed, followed much the same set of rules.

He turned as he walked, somehow still maintaining the same winding rhythm as he went. Lifting his brows so that his eyes went quite as wide as they could surely go.

"You do know that it was one of yours who took a run at us first? Michael?"

"I find that hard to believe." Aziraphale said with a nervous chuckle, which said that he did not find this quite so difficult to believe as he pretended. 

Crawley smiled and felt again that lovely little pang of fondness that he had nursed for the angel since the very moment they had met. He was ever so sweet, ever so well meaning and ever so more deserving of so much more than Heaven could offer him.

"Of _course_ you do. And it'll be a sad day, when the thought comes easy to you." He changed form, sinking back down into that of the snake in which he had first entered this world. Wound over once more to twine briefly about Aziraphale's bare feet and tilted its head up to appraise him with its large, lidless eyes. "Be seeing you, angel." It hissed, before then slithering and sliding off into the bushes; leaving a indentured coil in the still rain softened earth.

Aziraphale was left with the apple. He might not have ordinarily considered it, but something had stirred in him.

Perhaps it was having been on earth as long as he had. His human body had its needs after all. And the days following the rain _had_ been hot. His mouth was dry, his tongue was cracked and sore. The apple looked to him as though it were the oasis poised betwixt an endless desert. Whatever might have possessed him in that moment was enough to overcome whatever consternations he might have previously and ever so staunchly adhered to.

He took a bite from the side of the apple that Crawley had left conspicuously untouched. It was quite as juicy, as sweet and as satisfying as he had ever imagined it might ever have been. The first taste of that forbidden fruit, was undoubtedly the very sweetest of all.

Crawley, quite as convinced as he had been with the human woman, had poised between the bushes; watching as the angel had taken that first step, if not downwards, but into a world where a question was not so much a sin as it was an invitation.

And that very first bite was just as delicious to the serpent as it was to the angel who had taken it.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: (Random Good Omens Factoid) It mentions in the novel that Crowley's human form is his 'favourite' form and that he does nurse some concerns around shape shifting, because he's worried he will have some difficulty with shifting back into his human body again.
> 
> This is one of the many reasons as to why I do not heavily lean into Crowley just turning into a snake on a whim, even though I understand it's quite popular in fandom to think that he does. Honestly, you see him do it ONCE on the show, which does not actually suggest that it's something he does regularly or even, at ALL, post the Garden of Eden. If it wasn't for the fact that he has snake eyes, I would have even gone so far as to say that a snake is simply ONE of the guises he can assume and of no real importance at days close. 
> 
> I do in fact like that the book makes a point of saying that Crowley has trepidations around changing forms, because, really? If he liked doing so and was comfortable doing so, he had hundreds of opportunities in the T.V show where it would have been both appropriate and even helpful for him to have turned into a snake. 
> 
> He does not, I believe, because he likes his human body the most and does not actually see himself as a serpent. It's a part of him, yes, but not a part that factors into his character quite as much as people seem to think that it does. He LIKES being human, and in fact VERY much likes the novelties and privileges what being human affords him. Much easier to sip a glass of single malt in human form then it is if you're a snake.
> 
> Anyway, off on a rant again, sorry! If you enjoyed, please feel free to kudos, comment, all the usual. Until next time, and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	7. Or, where we ask the question as to why we never see enough men slow dancing in fancy restaurants.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'You didn't suppose it was so stupid when you were doing the gavotte with a whole mess of perfect strangers', Crowley thought, a little meanly but didn't bother with speaking such thoughts aloud. He could tell from the look on Aziraphale's face that the words which he had spoken were not, ironically, those that he seemed to have been feeling inside.
> 
> There was want there. Just as there had been want with that apple all those thousands of years ago. It was simply getting him to take that first bite which was the trick...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: All your bases are belong to me. But Good Omens does not belong to me. Which I admit is tough; being in this polyamorous relationship.
> 
> A/N: Thanks as always to everyone who is reading :) Your random Good Omens factoid of the day: In the opening credits, did you notice that in the first few screens Crowley is walking in front of Aziraphale? As though leading the way? I think by about the third screen, Aziraphale is then walking in front of Crowley. I wonder if it represents Aziraphale's changing mindset about his relationship with Crowley? Getting on board with the arrangement, so to speak.
> 
> Wouldn't surprise me. You know how clever that Good Omens Crew is :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~London SoHo - February 4th, 2019~** _

_**A.Z. Fell and Co... ** _

Flash forward some six thousand years. Crowley is standing in Aziraphale's bookshop. The time is somewhere mid-morning-ish. He is holding, in each of his hands, two perfectly separated halves of an apple. He looks quite as pleased with himself as does an airport security guard who has just seen someone stopping for more than five seconds in a non-drop off zone.

"Check it out. Perfect divide, straight down the guts of it. With nothing but my bare hands."

Aziraphale, sitting in his study space, tapped the edge of the knife that he had been preparing to use, against the woodgrain of his desk. Puffed air from the corner of his mouth to form an exasperated little tut.

"You know, I could have just cut it in half."

"Yeah, but where's the fun in that? And-" The demon turned his hands around to show the backs of them. "I only broke five fingernails this time."

"Only five?" Aziraphale asked, wincing at the snapped and bloodied stumps which might have once been not so unattractive nails. His own manicurist would be bleating with alarm if she were to bear witness to such a travesty of uncouth cuticle care.

"Yeah." The demon said, eyes starting to tear up as his excitement wore off just enough to allow for agony to slink on in and set up camp. "I'm in quite a bit of pain, right now."

Aziraphale sighed, giving a good natured roll of his eyes as he heaved himself out of his chair. "Come along then." He said, passing the hand which bore his distinct gold pinkie ring over both of Crowley's, healing the broken nails instantaneously. "I'm assuming you got this bright idea from one of your beloved _Tube_ videos?"

"Yeah, of course. Along with the makeup. Thought you might have said something about the makeup by now."

"Yes, I was going to. But then you persisted on wrestling with my apple."

"I wanted to make sure we got equal parts, angel." Crowley tossed Aziraphale the two pieces of now perfectly divided apple; which the angel quite nearly battered off into oblivion in his blustery state. "Here. Can you slice mine into little chunks and take the skin off?"

Aziraphale sighed, nonetheless indulgently as he plonked back down into his study chair and used the aforementioned abandoned knife to start peeling the skin off of the apple.

"Don't I always? Would his Royal Highness of Hell like for his feet to be rubbed whilst he eats the apple? That's assuming you don't need me to do the chewing for you first."

Crowley, drifting as expectantly as ever towards the liquor cabinet with much the same veracity as the earths orbit of the sun, ignored the angel's sarcastic tone and directed his energy into pouring himself a before yardarm drink. This had been happening quite a bit lately, now that he was finding himself with much less to do with the hours of his days.

"Should be fine so long as you take the skin off. Hate when apple skin gets caught between your teeth."

Crowley, it should be said, was learning a lot of things about himself following the Armage-Don't even bother. And not just about how painful a shred of errant apple skin feels when it slips on into an inopportune gap between your teeth. But other things. Other more decidedly prevalent, important and meaningful things. _Him_ things.

One of those things, was that he was inherently bad at keeping himself entertained.

Say what you will, the work of the devil kept his hands from getting idle. And it always presented him with a means of directing his thoughts and energy into an avenue in which to express his insurmountable creativity.

Crowley was a clever creature. And clever creatures never much like to be left to their own devices. Now that he was no longer dancing to the beat of Hell's drum, he came to the swift conclusion that he actually had very little with which to fill his days.

Aziraphale, of course, still had his bookstore to keep him busy. Even if he spent most of the time there attempting to deflect customers from ever actually entering the shop. He could still otherwise occupy his days with the filling of orders, cataloguing, collecting and the running of the books. Crowley could not reasonably expect to spend all day every day simply hanging about the shop. He had already gotten in trouble for being underfoot on a number of occasions and further distracting Aziraphale from whatever he might have been doing, simply for want of attention. They would still meet for lunch or dinner or some other sort of outing but this still left many hours of the day in which Crowley was required to tend to his own needs. And he was finding this difficult.

He spent a lot more time in his apartment than he could ever remember having done so before. He took care of his plants, spritzing them with water, rotating the ones that had been growing well out onto the deck for some 'photosynthesis privileges' and of course, executing the ones that had failed him by means of jamming their leafy bodies, dirt and all, down the garbage disposal. The house plants had, as a result of Crowley's increased attention, taken to shaking with such violence that the apartment was now filled with a permanent breeze which meant that Crowley was getting around in the company of his security blanket far more than he should have been.

In his retirement, Crowley had also taken a liking to watching video's on YouTube. Especially, the instructional videos. This proved to be something of amusement to Aziraphale, when Crowley had rocked up to his bookshop that very morning, with a full face of makeup, purple lipstick and eyes that had been so garishly attended to that he looked quite ready to premier in his very own demonic themed drag show.

"So on the topic of your makeup. I take it this is a new... interest for you?" Aziraphale had asked, placing the small plate on which he had arranged the now skinned and carefully sliced apple onto the table beside the couch. Crowley, helping himself to some sort of libation from the liquor cabinet, actually took the time to express offense for the pause before which the word 'interest' had been slotted.

"I'd _hardly_ go so far as to say 'interest', angel. I've been watching makeup tutorials online. You know. When they pop up in the feed." He sipped from his Barossa Valley Shiraz and deposited himself unceremoniously as usual into his favourite nook in the corner settee. As per his standard, he ignored the one or two customers who had managed to somehow infiltrate the divergent barriers of Aziraphale's shop and tossed a piece of apple into his mouth itinerantly. "You wouldn't _believe_ how difficult it is to get your eyebrows even. I'm thinking about having them micro-bladed, what do you think?"

"I think you might need another hobby." Aziraphale said, giving a teasing little scrunch of his nose as he returned to ticking things off on his clipboard. He took a piece of apple for himself and relegated it to one side of his mouth for chewing. It was a good apple; Crowley had picked them up from the local farmers market on his behest. The demon was always in the habit of selecting out from amongst the pile the very sweetest and reddest of apples. Surprises none.

"I _did_ have another hobby, but you told me I'm not allowed to make any more volcano's out of match sticks."

"And for good reason." Aziraphale said, exasperated. He had to hold up his fingers at the last moment to prevent the near expulsion of the apple he'd been chewing. "You about blew up most of your flat! And instead of calling the fire brigade, you called _me_ over to help you fight it with a fire extinguisher and a wet blanket. And then you told the landlord that _I_ was the one who set the fire in the first place!"

Crowley smirked, nodding happily at the memory. The look on Aziraphale's soot streaked sweet as pie little face as he stammered his genuine innocence, whilst Crowley stood off to the side, looking as though butter wouldn't melt on his (metaphorically) forked tongue… He may not have been an Active Demon anymore, but it seemed he would never shake the pleasure he took out of being bad.

"That being said, is there anything I can do for you? Aside from cutting up apples and critiquing your current list of extensive, and ever more _questionable,_ hobbies."

Crowley couldn't help but pull a face at this. Way to come off as sounding so impersonal towards someone you had been palling around with for the effective part of sixty centuries.

"I was just in the neighbourhood." Having driven purposefully to the bookshop with the explicit intention of visiting Aziraphale wasn't _quite_ in the realm of 'being in the neighbourhood' but he was hardly going to be upfront concerning his dependency issues. "Thought I might let you treat your favourite demon to a spot of lunch."

"For one, I certainly wouldn't be treating 'my favourite demon' to _anything_ if he insists on going out in public looking like _that._ "

Crowley sighed, passing a hand across his face and removing the thick layers of makeup he had spent hours painstakingly applying.

"For another, I'm afraid I simply haven't the time. I have a shipment that's supposed to be arriving anywhere between now and two o'clock." Aziraphale placed his clipboard down, puffing up with genuine pleasure. "The _Tamerlane and Other poems_ by Edgar Allan Poe! I have been trying to get my hands on it for the last eighty years. There are only _twelve_ in print remaining and I finally managed to secure one from a deceased estate!"

"Well, I know how anxious it makes you when a collection is incomplete." Crowley said, both empathetically and accurately. He took another sip from his glass, gargled the rich red wine a moment before swallowing. He glanced around the shop, as though something of interest might invariably present itself if he looked hard enough. "Is there… anything I can do to help around here?"

The gesture might have been a kind one if Aziraphale wasn't all too aware of what Crowley was like; especially when he was bored. On one occasion, he had 'assisted' with the stacking of a series of books for storefront presentation and, finding the standard staircase approach far too underachieving, had created something of an enormous card house which scraped the awning of what was a considerably high ceiling. When he had been placing the very last book atop the precarious structure, it ended up toppling over and the entire thing collapsed, taking Crowley, the ladder he was standing on and the five hundred pound bottle of sherry he'd been drinking, with it.

"Well…" Aziraphale drawled, feeling more the awkward as Crowley stared at him, unblinkingly, with a strange pup like quality that one wouldn't think a being with snake eyes would be capable of generating. Aziraphale always found it difficult to marshal his nerves whenever Crowley stared at him like that. It was the precise reason he attempted to avoid eye contact whenever he was trying to stand strong on a point. All his reservations just seemed to drain away.

But then he remembered that there _had_ been something he'd been meaning to get around to for quite some time now and had kept putting off because it was simply too terrible a bore. And it hardly seemed the sort of thing that Crowley would permit himself to do poorly, even unintentionally.

"You know I… I have been meaning to sit down and run through my accounts." Aziraphale said, glancing at Crowley sidelong. The demon, as expected did not leap off of the couch with girlish glee at the suggestion but rather sank further into it, groaning as he brought the glass to his forehead. "I'm usually so meticulous with them but with the Apocalypse and all, I've just gone and let them slip by for so long. You're _ever_ so clever when it comes to numbers. (Aziraphale was, ostensibly, every bit as good with numbers, perhaps even more so. But this was hardly about to win him the argument, was it?) Plus you know how I get around technology. It simply causes me a never ending headache."

" _You're_ a never ending headache." Crowley grumbled, pulling back another sip of the scotch before then making the very same mistake Aziraphale himself had been attempting _not_ to. He looked into the angels warm and earnest eyes, his round face all but set in what had to have been an unintentional pout but was nevertheless just as effective as Crowley's earlier staring. He found himself, as he so often did, softening. "Oh… fine then." He grunted, swinging himself off of the couch and topping up his glass once more from the cabinet. He would be needing it, after all.

"Oh, really?" Aziraphale said, beaming so beautifully it made Crowley feel a little sick inside. "That would be ever so kind."

"Shut it, or I won't be helping at all." Crowley said, pointing a finger in warning before crossing into the back room and setting himself down by the ancient computer system Aziraphale had done his utmost in recent days to avoid. "Right. Where are your stupid invoices. I'll make a start on them."

It should never have pleased Aziraphale as much as it did to get his way with Crowley. Such a thing hardly seemed in the spirt of being an angel, after all. But of course, he wasn't _really_ an angel. Not anymore. So he found himself not feeling as sorry for it as he might once have done. Crowley _had_ offered to help, after all. And he _was_ in need of a distraction...

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

And so; whilst Aziraphale contented himself with cataloguing and passively-aggressively putting off his would be customers, Crowley buried himself in an impressive pile of invoices, old receipts and letters from the tax office which spanned something of the better part of a half century. Aziraphale had been correct in his assessment of Crowley's proficiency with numbers; it had been, after all, how Crowley had managed to accomplish many of his diabolic feats. To say nothing of the twenty or so degrees he had attained, simply for want of having something to do in his idle hours. None of which he had any interest in pursuing much further than putting them in a silver frame and hanging them on the walls of his apartment.

Even whence in possession of a noggin containing a notoriously clever and cunning brain, it still took Crowley the better part of five hours (and one and a half bottles of imported wine) to work his way through a mere half pile of the papers from just _one_ of the boxes Aziraphale kept his documents in. By that stage he was grumpier than ever, quite drunk and had eaten only a few bites of a sandwich Aziraphale had lovingly let at his elbow at some point following noon. The angel knew full well that Crowley was getting shot of the task, as he had taken to swinging around in his chair at some ventures, staring at the ceiling and singing lines from _The Greatest Showman._ Trying, without much success mind, to hit the elusive high notes, which had the secondary, though not unappreciated side effect of driving the remaining customers from the shop.

He called it quits at about 5:45pm, when his eyes felt so strained that he was forced to pry the lids back with his thumbs. All the numbers were swirling around in a blurred miasma of ink, his head ached from thinking and his fingers were approaching carpel tunnel with a veracity unprecedented from his continued pounding of the ancient calculator Aziraphale kept on his desk. (Crowley was quite surprised to find that it wasn't an abacus, but there you go).

"Right. I've balanced as much as I can. Any more and I'm going to go permanently cross eyed." Aziraphale placed a cup of coffee down by Crowley's hand and the demon immediately brought it up to his mouth, uncaring as to whether it scalded him or not. "And seriously, _why_ did you go and let it _get_ this bad?! You've got invoices in here that date all the way back to 1935! How I'm supposed to reconcile that with any existing income is beyond me! And here I was thinking you were actually _good_ with this sort of thing!"

"Oh, I know. I _have_ let it get terribly out of hand." Aziraphale confessed, looking truly and genuinely aggrieved by the state of his finances. "But thank you for all that you have done. In the very least you have taken a good chunk out of the workload for me."

"Eh." Crowley grunted, pretending not so well not to care as he sipped his coffee. In actuality, it gave him a warm feeling to be of help to Aziraphale. It just got a little embarrassing when he was thanked for it so sincerely. "Okay. _Now_ that I've taken a run at this and you've got your book all lined up with the rest of your precious _Edgar Allan Poe_ collection can we _please_ get out of here? Go out for dinner or _something!_ I don't care. We can get henna tattoos or go for a teeth bleaching, whatever."

"As much as I would like to-" Aziraphale got no further than that before Crowley was sinking his head down into the still littered paperwork, groaning disparately. "Oh, I am sorry, it's just… well, I just need a little _me_ time. I was hoping to spend the evening reading. Put my feet up a while."

"But what are you going to _eat?"_ Crowley off sided from the midst of the aged, frayed and now incomprehensively stacked invoices. He felt this a very important question to ask, as Aziraphale did have a rather one-eyed appreciation when it came to food and it would have been both odd and extremely out of character for him to eschew any one of his daily meals.

"Thought I might just order in." Aziraphale said, beaming. And then, because Crowley looked about as close to crying as a demon could reasonably be, added: "Of course you're welcome to stay and have a bite to eat first. I wouldn't want you to go hungry."

"Well don't do me any favours." Crowley snapped, thinking it very cheeky of Aziraphale to have used him as he had, only to toss him out onto the street when he was done. He swung up out of his seat, coffee in hand and sauntered haughtily towards the door, just like the little hot house orchid he was. "I'll just go and eat out of a bin, or something. Go home to my apartment and hang out with my plants." He all but smashed his glasses back onto his face, turning back to Aziraphale with an indignant sniff. "At least _they_ appreciate my company."

Aziraphale rather thought that Crowley's plants were likely to be appreciating the time that he spent otherwise not occupied with their day to day 'care'. The poor things really weren't much different to prisoners of war, shivering and shaking whilst awaiting the warden to reappear and haul one of them out for a forced extraction of information. He was hardly about to get into the logistics concerning inappropriate horticultural care, however. Crowley wasn't likely to take any of it on board. The lush and verdant growth of his plants spoke for itself, so far as he was concerned. It hardly mattered to him that the now somewhat sentient plants only pushed themselves so hard because they were acting under great duress.

"Crowley, it's not that I don't appreciate your company. It's just that I'm very worn out." Aziraphale said, thinking even as he did that Crowley looked to have every intention of leaving with his favourite coffee cup. "You've been here almost constantly since the Apocalypse. I just wonder if there isn't something you might do to help fill up your days a little? Something productive."

"Like what? Get a job, you mean?" Crowley huffed at the thought. "What the Heaven could I do that I'd be any good at, angel? Run a fucking flower shop?!"

"Well, just a casual position or something. Couple of days a week." Aziraphale picked up from one of his armchairs a copy of that days newspaper. He opened it to a section near the back that he had noticed earlier and brought it over for Crowley to take a look at. "See, here? They're looking for casual staff at the Grange Estate nursing home."

Crowley looked at Aziraphale as though he had lost his mind. "Nursing home? Are you _mental?!_ Me, hanging out with a bunch of humans well past their expiration date?" He took the newspaper, ruffling its pages unnecessarily as he stared disgustedly down his nose at the advertisement. "What am I even supposed to do with them? Give 'em sponge baths? Wipe their asses? Is that how you think my time can best be spent productively, Aziraphale? Emptying out colostomy bags and spoon feeding blended boiled vegetables into a bunch of toothless, dribbling maws?"

"It was just a suggestion." Aziraphale said softly, holding up both hands to show that the meant no offense. And would much prefer the exaggerated tirade to stop then and there. "It seems to me, however, that a lot of nursing homes could make use of…" He gestured kind of vaguely towards Crowley. "… well, young men. I think the field is very overrepresented by women. They probably need some young, strapping chaps to help with the lifting and the like."

"I'm a _demon._ Not a _young, strapping chap._ " Crowley spat sarcastically.

"Well, you're _in_ a male type body. It's a little spindly but with your abilities I doubt you'd have any difficulty assisting with some of the more physical aspects." Aziraphale gave him a very sincere look. "Look, you've said yourself that you've been getting bored lately. What's the harm really in giving it a try?"

"You said that about the hugging and look how well that turned out." Crowley paused a moment, glanced towards the ceiling and started bending back his fingers, counting out something internally. "Speaking of which."

Aziraphale sighed, extended his arms and relinquished himself over for Crowley's set afternoon hug. He gave him a good rub on the back, perhaps a little as a means to make him the more receptive to what he was saying. It wasn't altogether fair of him, but if it was ultimately for the demon's own good, then what harm was there really?

He felt Crowley's body move in a deep, unmistakable sigh of surrender; his breath imparting warmly through Aziraphale's hair. "Oh, all right. I'll give it a go. Could be a laugh."

"Oh, my dear that is _marvellous!_ " Aziraphale enthused, stepping back out of Crowley's arms and giving him a small punch to the arm. The demon just grunted, rolling his head to the side in that way he did when he was embarrassed.

"Gotta be better than sitting around with my thumb up my arse. Or learning how to play the cup song."

"I think where you're going wrong with the cup song is that I'm fairly certain you are supposed to be using a plastic cup, rather than a ceramic one, my dear." Aziraphale said, taking his favourite mug from Crowley's hand as an afterthought and then gesturing towards the coat rack. He was feeling a touch more sprightly now and thought it very wise to make use of the demon's time whilst he still held monopoly of it. "You know, I think I'm rather feeling up to dinner after all. Why don't you pick the place?"

"You sure?" Crowley asked, not quite disguising his pleasure at having won Aziraphale to his side as effortlessly as he might have liked. The corners of his lips kept hitching up traitorously.

"Well, you're going to be a working man soon. Won't be able to keep you all to myself for much longer." Aziraphale smiled, taking Crowley's coat from the rack and assisting him with pulling it on. "Might as well get in while the getting's good, as they say."

"It's only a casual position, I doubt they'll be expecting me there from dawn until dusk, seven days a week." Crowley remarked, returning the favour by assisting Aziraphale into his own coat. He slid his hands into his pockets and jutted his left elbow out towards the angel, who slid his hand neatly into the customarily offered nook and permitted himself to be lead towards the door. "Least I hope not. You'll end up leaving me for some other younger demon with more time on their hands and more patience when it comes to supplementary taxes."

Aziraphale flashed Crowley a scolding thought. "Oh, perish the thought, my dear. What other demon could possibly compare?"

If one had been looking closely enough, they might have noticed the contented little smile Crowley allowed to creep onto his face; having already safely relegated Aziraphale into the passenger seat of his Bentley. The praise should never have pleased him so much as it did but it meant more than ever these days, to hear Aziraphale affirm those things that for so long Crowley could only hope that he felt. For if such words came easy now, what else might be possible?

He tested it a little that night; right after that first inaugural tapping together of their champagne flutes. Music was playing from the piano and a singer was in attendance. Elegantly dressed couples had drifted to the sequestered area in which dancing might be best enjoyed. They were all dressed quite a lot better than Crowley (well, not _better_ so much as more _suited_ to what was considered appropriate so far as the Ritz was concerned) but that meant little to a demon who could 'encourage' those running the restaurant to simply ignore their dress code stipulations when required. Aziraphale of course, _never_ looked out of place in a setting such as this. He might have looked a few decades shy of the current trends (why he was so entranced by the fifties Crowley just _couldn't_ understand) but he always looked neat and well presented and respectable.

 _And lovely,_ Crowley thought, watching as Aziraphale smiled with genuine, beaming warmth at the couples who had filled the modest dance space and were slowly turning in the guidance of one another's arms. _He really is the loveliest and sweetest soul on God's green earth. Even when he's laying it on thick, he manages to make it look endearing somehow._

The words were suddenly out of his mouth; quite before he'd had any thoughts as to how he might best compose them. "Do you, um... do you want to... dance?"

At least his tone had been nominal. He hadn't wanted to sound _too_ hopeful, after all. He'd always begrudged himself for looking too obviously disappointed when Aziraphale had rejected his offer of a ride back in the seventies; when the angel had gone to such great strains to provide him with Holy water. Had professed so honestly that he hadn't wanted - _couldn't he'd said, couldn't_ \- have him risking his life.

It was the first time he had allowed himself to believe, just for a moment, that Aziraphale had reached him at long last. And he had, that much was certain. But he had reached him where a closed door still lay between them. With all the locks and chains and bells and whistles still affixed firmly in place. He went too fast, Aziraphale had said, with perhaps his eye, earnest and aware and silently wanting, pressed to the peephole. He went too fast and wanted too much and _expected_ too much.

But the world was different now. Aziraphale was different now. Tremulous yes still but... so much lesser now than he had _ever_ been. He spoke his own mind, for one. He was not afraid to be ever more candid about his relationship with Crowley; whatever the nature of their ineffable relationship _was._ If there was a time to start tapping his knuckle on the outside of that door, than this was it.

The response was good; mainly because Aziraphale hadn't quite taken it in the nature of which it was offered. "Oh." He had chuckled, taking a sip from his champagne and smiling at Crowley with a humorous twinkle in his eye. "I hardly think the gavotte would be appropriate for a setting such as this. Why, I might inadvertently kick someone's table and send their dessert careening off through the air!"

"Not the gavotte, angel." Crowley said, his tone now serious in spite of Aziraphale's genuine chuckles of mirth. It sobered him properly, staring back at the demon whose eyes were now visible ever so slightly above the lenses of his glasses. Getting in that good and proper hard eye contact which had so often geared things in his favour in the past. "Dancing. Like..." He gestured with his heads towards the happy, predominantly Egyptian silk draped couples. Male female apiece but then this was hardly a consideration for someone like Crowley who, naturally, had little care as to who he might offend and in what manner such offense would be occurring. "You know."

Aziraphale's smile almost came right off of his face but he foisted it up at the last moment. It was an anxious effort however and Crowley could see the nervous energy present in how the angel now poised his champagne flute between both hands; the intensity of his eye contact.

"Oh. You mean like..." He pointed back towards the couples; as though there had been some question as to who the dancing people in the room might have been. "Them."

Crowley, slumped in his seat, as always, like a dead bumble bee, jerked his head back in a little nod. His jaw was jutting off to the side and his bottom lip pouted out. It might have looked uncaring and differential but to Aziraphale, who knew him ever so well, he knew that this offhand façade was the demon caring, in fact, a little too much. He was simply doing his utmost to protect himself. By acting as though he wasn't invested in whatever answer might have been coming.

Aziraphale tittered, glancing away now, because maintaining eye contact with Crowley, was quite often a recipe for disaster. "I can't... well, I can't dance like that. I'm sure I've told you."

"No. No of course you have. Of course." Crowley nodded, understandingly and took a very committed slurp of his champagne. Aziraphale added, as a sort of sad afterthought;

"Besides... it would look rather silly, would it not? Two men, dancing together."

 _You didn't suppose it was so stupid when you were doing the gavotte with a whole mess of perfect strangers_ , Crowley thought, a little meanly but didn't bother with speaking such thoughts aloud. He could tell from the look on Aziraphale's face that the words which he had spoken were not, ironically, those that he seemed to have been feeling inside.

There was _want_ there. Just as there had been _want_ with that apple all those thousands of years ago. It was simply getting him to take that first bite which was the trick.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Some beach in Italy~** _

Elsewhere, a very irate and very soggy Man Who Never Was, dragged himself up and out of the Atlantic Ocean; swinging kelp from his person as though they were a cat of nine tails and the very air was the insurgent convict upon whose back he was dispensing a lashing.

 _West._ Why _had he gone_ West? _That was the LONG way around!_

He took a moment to calm himself. Chart his bearings. Made his way this time, North. He had a lot of lost time to make up for and an arse whooping which was _many_ centuries overdue.

Behind him; several Fin whales had already beached themselves, seemingly without precedent, upon the beach.

In the days coming, they were to find that it was they, all things considered, who were the lucky ones.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks so much for reading everybody! If you have some thoughts you would like to share, please feel free to do so. Constructive criticism is also very much welcomed, so don't be afraid to speak your mind if there is something you have noticed that you wish to point out. I'm a gentle lamb and am open to both discussion and to improving upon my writing :)  
> Much love to you out there my darlings! Until next time and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~xxx ooo


	8. Or, in which an archangel starts to doubt.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley had never been kissed before. Not even during his time as an angel. He'd never experienced feelings of love strong enough to transcend into that need to ascribe physical form in relaying it. Not until he had met Aziraphale, of course. And the desire then, was hampered by his transformative plunge through the destructive sulphur of Hell; which dampened so much of what had been a natural and effervescent lightness.
> 
> But he had felt it all the same. Had felt it far longer and with such depth of intensity it sometimes made him ache inside.
> 
> The need to express what he felt in ways that extended beyond mere words and glances. Both were fine and a good thing in their own right, of course. Sometimes, he simply wanted... needed more.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: I do not own Good Omens and make no claims to any of the characters or concepts. Any relation to person's living or dead or angelic and demonic are entirely coincidental and actually... kind of bloody creepy.
> 
> A/N: Good Omens random factoid of the day: The doona/quilt on Warlock's bed when he was a child... a combination of red and tartan. Is this a subtle indication of both Crowley and Aziraphale's influence in his upbringing? Crowley with his red collar and Aziraphale with his tartan? Food for thought :3
> 
> Thanks as always to everyone who is reading, commenting, kudo-ing and supporting! Hope you enjoy the update! xxx ooo

**~X~**

* * *

**_~February 7th - Thursday Morning~_ **

**_Eleven months, twenty-six days to the Apex..._ **

**_... Please don't ask me to count out the minutes._ **

It had been on Gabriel's mind.

Which was a rare thing. He was not an Angel habitually known to stint on things that he had otherwise not been directed to stint upon.

And yet, the thought persisted.

The doubt ( _may he be forgiven_ ) _persisted._

It had persisted to such a niggling and such an insufferable measure in fact, that it had resulted in him doing something which he had never before imagined himself ever having reason to do.

Meeting with the enemy.

Undirected.

On the sly.

After hours, of course.

They met in St. James park. Because all clandestine meetings were predestined as such to take place in St James Park. Gabriel had arrived an hour early and had taken his human body out on a jog; as much a means to calm the bodies nerves as to maintain its already staunch musculature. The outlet of serotonin and feel good hormones was a sensation he might not otherwise have cause to experience; given that they were demonstrably set apart in the Heavenly realm. He liked the feeling of the lactic acid build up in his legs; the pins and needles and the tight pull of his lungs as the spring air eased in and out of them.

Lord Beelzebub arrived late of course ( _as a point of principle_ ) and had installed themselves on a bench near the river. They watched the ducks, grappling with the natural and near overwhelming urge to sink the errantly cheerful little bastards beneath the water in which they were so merrily puddling and might very well have done so, if not for a rather sweaty and offensively blustery sounding Gabriel dropping onto the seat beside them. Given the natural discrepancy of size between their human bodies, the angel dispensed so much of his weight and in such a dramatic fashion that it just about launched the petite demon into the river they had just been observing.

"You're late." Beelzebub stated, straightening their hat and swiping a finger beneath their nose. There was nothing seeping out, but it always _itched_. Forcing back the sores and the flies which might otherwise have hovered about their person always resulted in their having a persistent and nascent sensation not dissimilar to hay fever.

"I know. Got caught up with my thoughts. I apologize."

"It wazn't a criticizm." Beelzebub said, confused as to whether or not they ought to have been annoyed or impressed by an angel being tardy. Being a practical creature however, they decided to waylay such considerations and focus on the business at hand. "What did you want to talk about?"

Gabriel sponged off his forehead with a small towel that he kept tucked into the waistband of his track pants. He felt a little dry and dehydrated. If he had been an earthbound agent such as Aziraphale, he might have known what to do to remedy this. But the idea of imbibing... of inadvertently killing even the most _minute_ of life that might exist in water, well. He would simply have to remain dry. There was nothing else for it.

"I'm not even certain why I'm doing this." He said. He almost stuttered, in fact. He looked down at his hands. "I spent longer than I care to imagine mulling it over in my head. And it's ridiculous, of course it is. But then perhaps... perhaps it... isn't?"

"If you're going to wazte my time, I'd juzt as soon be getting back to the office." Beelzebub grunted, not interested in playing ridiculous twisting angelic word games. They climbed up off of the bench, took a sip of their honeycomb and chocolate flavoured milkshake and turned to make their way. "I've got far too much paperwork following the demize of our Lord. Never the mind all the applicationz I need to process so az to find a suitable replacement. The selection criteria alone beggarz belief."

"Please. I... apologize." Gabriel was standing, feeling the familial ache burn down the backs of his thighs. Something even more important searing the nodes of his celestial mind. "I'm talking in riddles, I know. I do that." He shrugged. "Honestly... I don't know why I do that."

"You alwayz did." Beelzebub remarked, feeling what might have been a twinge of historical emotion pinch the edges of their heart. "Nothing much haz changed in that regard."

"I... I don't think it would be helpful for either of us to go bringing up the past right now."

"No. Of course not. Doezn’t change thingz, doez it? Never did." They sniffed, drifted back to perch upon the bench. Sipped their drink and savoured the unfamiliar sweetness upon a tongue which was so accustomed to bitterness. "That meeting troubled you."

"As much as it did you." Gabriel sat as well, brushed back strands of sweaty salt and peppered coloured hair from his forehead. "Of course I would prefer to say that it did not-"

"Archangel. The reazon we are having thiz meeting iz clearly because you cannot profess theze concerns to your colleaguez. Do not waste my time by making excusez for your, quote unquote, 'unheavenly' behaviour and speak plainly."

There was none quite like Lord Beelzebub when it came to 'cutting through the bulls... wool'. It was actually kind of reassuring, Gabriel thought. Their confidence and clarity provided structure; a set of guidelines as to how to proceed in what was indisputably a very confusing time. _They had always been this way_ , he remembered. And then regretted having done so.

"I wondered. ...If you or any of your... cohorts might have gotten a look at one of those... contracts? Before the contingency agents signed them?"

Beelzebub gave him a bored look. "Becauze only a _demon_ would have sought to stick their noze in where it ought not to be stuck?" They tutted, took another sip from their drink. Glowered at the ducks which had started to gather around; apparently believing one of them to be in possession of bread or some other sort of mallard specific supplement. "I tried to catch some of the writing, but it blurred over before my eyez. I wazn’t able to read it. Some sort of spell, no doubt. The otherz encountered the same difficulty."

"Indeed." Gabriel said, hardly surprised that such measures had been introduced. He added: "Something strange."

Beelzebub looked to him; annoyed as usual with that almost stereotyped angelic insistence on introducing drama into even the most innocuous of circumstances. Say what you will, but at least a demon would get straight to the heart of the matter. With a sharpened blade, when necessary.

"Yes?"

"Something I noticed. Written on the side of the cannister." Gabriel glanced towards Beelzebub and it was such an earnest expression of which some underlying despair permeated that it fairly voided the irritation they had been nursing up until now. "My position is... awkward. As is Michael's. We..." He wrung his hands together. Such a typically instilled posture of angelic anxiety, it seemed. "You and I are in the same position. So far as our respective realms go. I felt... well... I don't know." He went to stand. To walk away. To withdraw on the entire, unformulated, untypically forthright exchange. "It was a bad idea. I ought not have troubled you."

Beelzebub was not one who bandied their words, nor their time, lightly. They certainly did not appreciate any of those things being wasted and they demonstrably detested being left 'hanging' quite more than anything else. 

It was a shame, because the milkshake had been delicious, but there had been nothing else within reach to throw. Short of one of the ducks, but they hardly felt as though a belligerently quacking bundle of feathers was about to make the point.

The cup within which the milkshake was interred split apart at the point of impact; soaking and staining the back of the archangel's grey jogging attire and sending a torrent of brown chilly liquid all throughout his hair. To Gabriel, it was just about as shocking as it had been strangely soothing.

"You angel'z are the most constipated painz in the arse I have ever had the displeazure of dealing with." Beelzebub said, gleaning some slight satisfaction from Gabriel's dripping, shivering visage. A number of humans, idling in the park, also seemed to find it particularly piquant. "Much az it painz us both to admit, we are in the same boat here. We have both been hamstrung by our contracts, we have all been blindsided and we are all in the dark az to what iz supposed to happen next. Your God waz once our God, do not forget. And She still wieldz power incontestably greater than anything we might ever aspire to." They gave the Archangel a knowing look. "I get the impression, Archangel, that it iz you however, who is much more terrified of Her right now, than me.”

This was true. This was entirely true. And the clarification was enough to send the Archangel Gabriel, God's right hand, to stumbling to his knees. A sound came out of him. Something like a sob. His human face wrenched. A feeling of terrible, agonizing pain welled up in him.

It was so pitiable to bear witness to, that Beelzebub went to him; took him by the arms and then lead him back to perch upon the bench. It must have been a sight; for Gabriel's body was significantly taller and broader than that of Beelzebub's; the demon being a little less than five feet in height and very petitely framed.

You could see that the humans gathered in the park that morning couldn't quite think what to make of the strange pair. They were almost as odd as the bow-tie wearing, white-haired dorky high school history teacher and his equally dorky failed rock star James Dean wannabe boyfriend who sometimes drifted in and out to unlawfully feed the ducks and who sat awkwardly on opposite ends of the one bench, casting wistful, longing gazes at one another, ignorant to the internal screams of all regular going park persons, united in one dissonant chorus of: " _Just tell him you love him, ya big goof!_ "

But I digress.

"The date on the cannister." Gabriel said at length, still dripping with milk, chocolate and honeycomb infused flavouring. Uncaring as to how, in a regular human being, the cold milk would be sending their kidneys to shuddering. "The date of which it was sent. It makes no sense." He stared at Lord Beelzebub; his once great enemy and yet, ever more intrinsically, someone who seemed more by the moment, to be a great and equally unintentional ally. "5008 BCE. _5008_."

Beelzebub hadn't noticed the label. It had been facing away from them. The date though, they did indeed understand. And shared along with Gabriel, the enormity of what that particular timeframe meant.

"5008 BCE..." They locked eyes. Something unlocked at a definitively deeper level. "The Contingency Plan waz formulated thirty yearz prior to the revolution."

"It makes no sense." Gabriel repeated, taking the hand towel from his waistband and using it now to idly sponge the mess from about the back of his neck. "I mean... it can't... it's... impossible."

"The Contingency plan dictates that all soulz shall be divided up between Heaven and Hell." Beelzebub flinched as one of their veiled flies buzzed against the metaphysical membrane which kept it sequestered. There was a sensation quite a great deal more discomforting than this however, stirring in the core of their being and it was one which they doubted would be quite as simple to ignore. "Hell didn't exizt in 5008 BCE. Nor did the race of demonz."

"Nor the human race." Gabriel clarified and the look they now shared was, with the exception of their expunged agents Aziraphale and Crowley, the very first instance in history whereupon an angel and a demon shared a true understanding of what the other might be feeling. Exempting that one time when the pair of them had both been forced to share the misery of imparting the failure of the Apocalypse to their respective people. _That_ was a doozy. "It was predicated on the grounds that... your people, would rebel. Which poses the question-"

"You're questioning."

"-how would the Almighty foresee that you would rebel? We were harmonious then. All of Heaven. I don't believe a one of us to have been unhappy. To have been... questioning."

"You're _doubting_." Beelzebub stated, their eyes widening.

"I'm doubting." Gabriel confirmed and looked so deeply and positively disturbed by the admission that not even the Lord of the flies could glean much satisfaction from it.

**~X~**

* * *

_**~February 7th - Thursday Morning~** _

_**Crowley's Flat - Mayfair...** _

Earlier that same morning, in a junket not too far removed from where the Archangel and the Lord of Hell were gloomily seated, another demon was experiencing a major bout of doubt himself.

Doubt as to how he had ever let himself get talked into the notion of gainful employment.

Aziraphale. Aziraphale and his stupid, sense expunging _hugs_.

They were good hugs. There weren't many things nicer in all the known universe than a hug from Aziraphale.

But Crowley was started to get the sense that he was due to invite in any number of contrarily irritating and not so readily enjoyed things if he continued to let the prospect of a hug make all his decisions for him.

It felt altogether a very appropriate, and very human male thing, actually. Letting the offer of physical pleasure cloud your otherwise better judgment.

He wasn't sure whether to be amused by this.

He certainly _wasn't_ amused by having to haul his arse out of bed at a time in the morning that couldn't even be accurately labeled the ' _crack_ ' of dawn. The stars were still out and he could hear an owl hooting somewhere off in the distance. He had in fact only managed to disinter himself, because Aziraphale, serving as metaphorical rooster, had called Crowley at 5:00am with much the same jolly aplomb and cheer in his tone he might have possessed at any other, more reasonable hour of the day. He hardly seemed at all put out by the demon's gnarly grunts and snarls and reminded him to hop in the shower, style his hair neatly and do his utmost to try and look presentable for his first day on the job. He suggested something with a tartan trim, so as to look especially competent. This was when Crowley had hung up on him.

_Fucking tartan._

The demon had in fact, once upon a time, been accustomed to getting up whilst the bats were still doing their rounds. But this was back in the days when he might have needed to ride a horse to where he needed to get to ( _granted the horse didn't buck him off a dozen times along the way_ ). Or catch a boat. Having a car had eradicated a great deal of this early morning pish. But the nursing home was located off in suburbia and they commenced their working day at 7:00am. As it was his first shift, he was asked to be there extra early, so he could be properly inducted by the staff.

He took a shower, hoping that the hot water might wake him up some. It had the reverse effect and he found himself dosing off instead with his cheek pressed against the tile wall. Fortunately, Aziraphale had anticipated there would be some difficulties in rousing him and had gone to the extra effort of busing across town with coffee and pastries which he had purchased at their favourite café. He let himself into the apartment ( _Crowley had long ago gifted him a spare set of keys_ ) and immediately went to the hall bathroom, where he could hear water sloshing and see heavy steam emanating from the crack below the door. He rapped his knuckle sharply against lacquer stained wood.

"Hello? You haven't fallen asleep in there have you? You do need plenty of time to get across town."

Crowley grunted awake, a grouting imprint having made its temporary home in his cheek. For fucks sake. He knew Aziraphale was a mother hen, but to actually go to all this effort just to make good and certain he was ready?

"I'm fine, I'm just... brushing my teeth." Demons and angels could of course use magic to keep their teeth and their breath smelling and looking as white and as clean as they needed. Crowley did so before disinterring his sleepy, dripping body from the shower and giving a wave of a finger to shear the water from his person. He was so tired that he wasn't thinking very clearly, however and quite forgot that he could use the very same trick to simply magic on the clothes that were hanging in the wardrobe in his room. Common sense was a privilege to be enjoyed by those beings who hadn't been rousted out of bed in the middle of the night, after all.

And so poor Aziraphale was treated to even such a shock, when Crowley simply strode right on out of the bathroom and stumped his naked body over to the bedroom to get dressed. He was in full male form as well, having chosen it seemed to make certain he would entirely blend in when he went out and interred himself in the workforce. In the off chance all of his clothes were ripped off by handsy, hormonally disinhibited retirees, or something of the sort.

"Oh, for goodness sake." Aziraphale grumbled good naturedly, setting out an egg and bacon croissant ( _Crowley's go to morning imbuement_ ) and the Styrofoam cup which contained his cappuccino on the kitchen isle. He was completely aware that he was blushing, but as to why he wasn't altogether certain.

He had never seen Crowley naked before, that much was true. They had bathed in one another's company in the past, but always in their smalls at the very least. And Crowley appeared even more shy when it came to his human body than Aziraphale. Which was precisely the reason as to why Aziraphale had shown such courtesy and respect to Crowley by being very careful to magic clothing on and off when they had swapped bodies. He had not required the use of the lavatory during their short stint in each others forms, so his experience of the demon's physique had ( _until blessed moments earlier_ ) been ostensibly limited.  
It was a very telling sign as to just how exhausted and distracted the demon was, to have done such a thing. Likely his head was in a fuzzy, sleep deprived, potentially even hungover cloud and it had been quite enough to void his minutes only recent memory of Aziraphale actually being present in the flat in the first place.

 _Could be worse_ , the angel supposed, unwinding the rubber band from around the newspaper he had plucked from the stoop. _If one has to be confronted with such a thing first hour of the morning, you could do a lot worse than a slight little derriere like Crowley's._

He quite literally flinched at the thought, squeezing his eyes shut as though someone had brought a hammer down swiftly upon his fingers. _Dear Lord... why did I even look?! Can this body never be trusted to behave itself?_

Meanwhile, Crowley had, halfway through pulling on his shirt _(underpants were an afterthought_ ) remembered that Aziraphale was in fact in the flat and almost melted into the floor in embarrassment.

_Oh SHIT. Did he just see me swan on through completely starkers?_

He must have done. Crowley had used the main bathroom this morning ( _the fact that his bedroom had an ensuite had gone out the window right along with common sense_ ) and his room was located right across the hall from it.

He reassured himself with the thought that perhaps Aziraphale had been looking in the other direction. Or more the likely had his eyes shut, absorbed in the consumption of whatever particular pastry he was currently hoeing into.

Satisfied that he hadn't in fact grossly humiliated himself, Crowley finished dressing; a job which he never saw fit to do poorly, whipped a hand about his head to style his hair and picked up his sunglasses. He didn't put them on yet; he was still inside after all and the lenses were dark, which did not mesh well with the fact that it was still all but night-time on the outside. He loped into the kitchen with all the energy and verve of a mid-term university student, dropping himself heavily onto one of his designer stools and gesturing vaguely towards his mouth.

"Too tired to pick up food. Feed me."

"I'm not feeding you." Aziraphale tutted, pushing the plate closer as some sort of minor incentive and taking up Crowley's spare hand from the counter. He prized apart a set of fingers which felt as though they had been taken to by rigor mortis and managed to install them about the Styrofoam cup. "Drink your coffee. And what-" He made a sound; sort of a mixture of a groan and a barely stifled snicker. "- what on earth have you gone and done with your hair?"

"Just the usual." Crowley grumbled, managing to drag the cup up to his lips and sip from the small hole in the lid. He felt Aziraphale's fingers pet to his hair; quite a great deal higher than they ought to have done.

"You've given yourself a beehive hairdo! Why, you look just like a member of the Ronette's!" Aziraphale laughed, glancing a finger through the air and returning Crowley's hair to the style he currently kept. He still felt an overwhelming need to take a comb to it. "Well, it's a good thing that I was here then. Can you imagine going in to work on your first day looking like that?"

"I would have noticed eventually. Wouldn't have been able to get in the car, for starters." Crowley slurped in some more coffee, took a rather gargantuan bite from his croissant. He was starting to feel a bit more regular now, though his head still had a nasty temporal ache. "Thanks for bringing breakfast over."

"Oh please. I'm quite sure I got all the thanks I ever needed, watching you cross the hallway in the altogether." Aziraphale teased, scrunching up his nose. Crowley's eyes just about fell out of his head and he did something which Aziraphale was quite certain he had never before seen. He blushed. "There's no need to be embarrassed. You're obviously tired. These things happen."

"You will forget that it ever happened if you know what's good for you, angel." Crowley attempted to threaten. Aziraphale, of course, felt not the least bit threatened.

"Rather hard to forget."

"Hey. You don't see me bringing up the fact that I saw you naked and using it as verbal ammunition."

Aziraphale was quite reasonably shocked by this. "When on earth did you ever have cause to see me naked?"

"I was in your body for over twenty-four hours. What, you really think that in all that time I _wouldn't_ have seen you naked?"

"I never looked at _your_ body!"

"Well I had to wash _yours_! Yours sweats more than my does!"

Now Aziraphale rather felt like melting away to nothing. He looked so intensely embarrassed and self-conscious that Crowley actually took mercy on him for it.

"There's not like you had anything to worry about. I didn't parade it around for all and sundry to see. Didn't do anything untoward with it. Just washed and went. _Didn't let the water run cold, you know what I mean_?"

"Yes, but you saw me... saw, _it_ rather... naked." Aziraphale said in a very shy, vulnerable voice. He looked almost on the verge of crying. The very idea of Crowley... handling his body... Of course he trusted him. He'd have to have done in order to have effected the change in the first place but still... The thought of Crowley's... his hands... his hands which Crowley had been controlling. _Touching_. It just... "I mean... what must you _think_?"

Crowley was confused by this. "Of what? It's just a body! There's nothing wrong with it! It's a bit softer than some bodies out there true, but that's nothing to be embarrassed about!"

"But it's overweight." _Those hands scrubbing with a bar of lavender scented soap. Under hot water; likely as close to broiling point as the flesh would permit. A body so much different to what Crowley must have been accustomed. The round stomach. A bottom quite a great deal wider than his own. All the... ins and outs and..._

"Who cares?! You like food; big whoop! I found it a very comfortable ride, actually. Nice and soft and warm. You don't got all the bones poking out like I do."

"You're not bony." Aziraphale said firmly, wondering even as he did if his body being referred to as a 'comfortable ride' was inappropriate or not. It tickled him as sounding just slightly 'off' for some reason. "You are _lean_. And you have wonderful cheekbones. Pon my word, you can't even see mine."

Crowley's body had been light and breezy. His feet just about swam above the ground when he walked. He had noticed quite a few sets of eyes upon him when he'd been out and about. Admiring. There were certain subsets of humans who clearly enjoyed and appreciated Crowley's appearance. He hadn't minded the attention in the least. He wondered if Crowley noticed quite as much as he had?

"But you have such cute cheeks." Crowley cooed, leaning over and pinching his fingers up under Aziraphale's jaw, pressing his thumb and fingers into the angel's round cheeks. He got his hand slapped for his efforts. "Don't stress on it, angel. They're just bodies. Wrapping paper at the end of the day. Or more like a smooth car which carries our souls around."

"Speaking of carrying our souls around, you had best carry yours over to the Grange. Wouldn't want to be running late on your first day."

"True that." Crowley jammed the half eaten croissant back into the bag whence it came, resolving to eat the rest of it if he had a break. He grabbed the bag, his Styrofoam cup and snapped his fingers so as to whip the folder of required paperwork directly into his waiting hand. Seeing that his hands were now full, Aziraphale plucked up the Bentley's keys, packed up his pastry box and took the elevator down with Crowley to the ground floor. They walked to where the Bentley was parked and Aziraphale opened it for him. He stood, beaming effervescently, eyes brimming over with tears as Crowley slid his various odds and ends onto the far side of the seat. He turned before climbing in himself and groaned to see the soppy look on the angel's face.

"Oh, what? Are you seriously _crying_ , right now?"

"I'm sorry." Aziraphale said, taking a handkerchief from his inside pocket and using it to dab delicately at the corners of his eyes. He did nothing whatsoever to contain the truly chuffed smile which had stolen over the lower half of his face. "I'm just..." His shoulders rose and fell with the ever so pleased sigh he emitted. "I'm just so... _proud_ of you."

Crowley tilted his head back, groaning his disgust to the Heavens. All the better with which to hide the embarrassment he so often experienced whenever Aziraphale expressed approval.

"Oh for fucks sake, _don't_ be proud of me. Oh that stupid face, _I can't stand it_. It's like you're radiating pure sugar, I can feel all my teeth rotting, _stop_..."

"It's all right, I'll be getting along now, I don't want to make you late after all." He made to leave but right before doing so, set the box of pastries upon the curb and opened up his arms to the demon. "It's going to be a long day. So if you need your hugging fix, you had best get in whilst the getting's good."

Crowley sputtered air through his lips, as though it were Aziraphale who was being placated in this situation rather than he himself. "Yeah, all right. Let's make it quick though. Any more of this fluff and we'll become a fire hazard."

He shut the car door and made a big show of putting his own arms out and all but slinging them around Aziraphale with the sort of long limbered irascibility of those strange puppet things you see outside auto dealers. Aziraphale was, of course, far the more tender and unashamed and wrapped his arms tight and firm about Crowley's back, giving him a most loving, most genuine embrace. He sank into it even further himself, aware that changes were going to be occurring and feeling ever more intensely the love that he held in immeasurable spades for the demon. A love which far transgressed that of natural, angelic love. A love he could never quite reconcile and yet found equally as impossible to turn away from.

"You're going to be _wonderful_ , my dear." He whispered, turning his face in towards Crowley's cheek and dispensing a kiss against the rise of it. The demon's body stiffened in response and Aziraphale, convinced he had made a terrible error in judgment, pulled away and yanked up the box of pastries from the sidewalk. "Right. Well. I'll be off. Have a good day and all. Ta-ta!"

He took off in quite as much of a rush as Crowley had ever seen him. Which was disappointing to the demon, who had been surprised by the kiss but in the most wonderful way in which a person might ever be surprised.

That was, of course, an angel for you, though. They gave in but an inch to their feelings and then emotionally castrated themselves for it. No surprises there. An angel was more spooked by the conscious admission of their desires then they were anything else in existence. Crowley fancied that Aziraphale was centuries more terrified of giving in to himself than he had ever been in the moments when the Lord of all Darkness rose up out of Hell, with every intention of cleaving the still living flesh from their bodies.

_So skittish._

But then... was he really any better himself?

Crowley had only very recently started to permit himself the wiggle room in which to wonder whether he and Aziraphale might potentially deepen their relationship. Transgress it further, to encompass something... _more_. Whatever _more_ that form might take.

Crowley rather liked change. Change was, after all, how the world had moved on from such infernal blights as the god damned fourteenth century. It paved the way for improvement. Opened up new avenues to explore. Cars and aeroplanes and modern music. Anti-perspirant. Toilet paper. Never mind what the clever human beings were doing with wine these days. So very much to choose from; so many different variety's, names and colours. Grapes and years and techniques and blends. And Gin, of all things - _gin!_ He never would have thought Gin had many places in which to grow and expand but the people of earth never quite ceased to amaze with their ingenuity. These were all good things.

The kiss had been a good thing.

It had been his first, come to think of it.

Human's kissed. Angel's kissed, even. A kiss was an act of love; far more reverential when dispensed by angel's, of course. With humans, it might mean any number of other things. The interpretations were as wide and as varying as much anything was when it came to the complex and incontestable human race.

Demon's didn't kiss. Though they understood love ( _for it was an experience quite as good as it was bad, at times_ ) they did not kiss. If possessed by a moment of weakness and attribution of affection for one of their kind, they might have given a loving bite. Every so often it might have been well received. Often times it resulted in much the same manner as when two funnel web spiders came across one another in the wild and then it was a simple matter of trying to find adequate furniture to shield yourself with until the bodily vitae stopped slapping against the walls.

Crowley had never been kissed before. Not even during his time as an angel. He'd never experienced feelings of love strong enough to transcend into that need to ascribe physical form in relaying it. Not until he had met Aziraphale, of course. And the desire then, was hampered by his transformative plunge through the destructive sulphur of Hell; which dampened so much of what had been a natural and effervescent lightness.

But he had felt it all the same. Had felt it far longer and with such depth of intensity it sometimes made him ache inside.

The need to express what he felt in ways that extended beyond mere words and glances. Both were fine and a good thing in their own right, of course. Sometimes, he simply wanted... _needed_ more.

The kiss he had left to Aziraphale's knuckle, a mere few weeks earlier... that had been the first time he had kissed someone himself. Exempting the crank of the Bentley when, pre-Armage-Don't-even-bother it had blown up after being driven through Hell fire and invariably held together only by the stubborn glue of Crowley's pig-headed-head. But the first non-inanimate object, for certain.

Exempting perhaps the time that he had fairly much nibbled the sides of Aziraphale's neck so as to embarrass him in front of the kebab shop owner. But that didn't really count. Not really. The intention had been demonstrably different. He had meant only to have his fun at the angels expense. It did not come from a genuine want and or need to cherish Aziraphale, not like it had when he had placed that quick, but ever so meaningful kiss to his hand.

The kiss was good. Even if Aziraphale had panicked and run away as though his coattails were aflame, it was still a _good thing_. Crowley had never much liked good things in the past. But they were quite all right if they were happening to him, he decided.

Angel's kissed out of love. Pure, undiluted, unfiltered love. It meant, even if Aziraphale had difficulties with conveying it, that he most certainly _loved_ Crowley.  
And that was quite enough clarification to make one, until now inexorably sleepy and grumpy demon, quite as chipper as he could ever be expected to be at such an ungodly hour of the morning.

 _Today,_ he thought and grinned for the curse he was about to make; a curse which might very well have made all the collective upper lips of Hell curl in his direction. _Is going to be a_ damned _good day._

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks always to everyone who is reading, following the story, commenting and kudoing! Feel free to do more of the same, if you feel I have earned it and then if you like, jump on over to the next chapter!
> 
> As always and with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	9. Or, in which a demon is entrusted to the care of the infirm.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Picture doesn't do it justice. Not quite." Crowley looked at one of the photos on his phone. Of Aziraphale's nervous, scrunched nosed little smile. Looked to the subtle pink of his lips and thought back to how they had been pressed to the side of his face that morning. Wondered, briefly, what it might have been like if he had turned his head, such as he had wanted, and to have placed his lips to where his cheek had been. He could just as soon as feel his own hand, sliding about to press to the angel's neck. To cup to his shoulder. To pull him in, claim him. To be claimed...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Sponsor me on Patreon and you will recieve all my exclusive NSFW content for the low, low price of only $85.95 per month... Nah, I kid ;) Any and all NSFW stuff I write is all yours, all free, non-refundable.  
> Also, I don't own Good Omens. Peace!
> 
> A/N: On a random note, just watched the movie Truth or Dare and couldn't help but think that if Crowley was the demon who possessed the game, what sorts of Truth's and Dares would our favourite little dork ask the protagonists. "I pick truth." "Okay, uh... who was the first person... you had a, crush on?" "I'm not telling you that." "Okay. Cool. I respect your decision. Free will and all that. ... How about you? Truth or dare?" "Dare." "Whoa, okay... this is a tricky one... um... eat a taco without turning your head sideways?"
> 
> It would have very quickly gone from a scary movie, to a comedy of errors before you could even blink. Crowley's just too well-meaning and naïve to get nasty with things.
> 
> As usual, my dears, thank you for everyone who is reading and following along. If you would care to partake of the following update, I will be more than happy to join you on the flip side!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~February 7th - 7:00am~** _

**_The Grange Estate Nursing Home - London, Suburbia... _ **

After a drive punctuated by heavy commuter traffic (tolerated for the most part by contrarily pleasant thoughts) Crowley at long last rocked up to the Grange Estate nursing home for his first casual shift. Ahead of time, which might have been a point of contention in the days in which Hell was keeping score (every little bit had helped, after all) and something of which he now felt all the prouder for having achieved. Doing well in this regard was likely to have made Aziraphale proud in turn and this was quite the only opinion of which he truly gave a fuck about these days.

He went one better in fact, feeling it rather poor form to park in a handicap spot (such as he might have done in not so distant days past) and actually went to the effort of driving into the visitors parking lot. From there, he sauntered his way over to the front office where he was to meet with the on site team leader Rita.

Rita was quite everything Crowley had expected the manager of a nursing home to be; homely, brusque and more than likely to be returning home to the company of several different coloured cats at the end of her shift. She took one look at Crowley, sunglasses still on whilst indoors, hip cocked at a jaunty angle, black leather pants crowned by a belt in the shape of a snake and carefully coifed so as to look effortlessly messy (likely dyed) dark red hair and concluded that he was 1.) Still trapped in the 90's and 2.) As gay as the day was long.

Both things which suited her down to the ground. She was a fan of 90's music herself (God bless Westlife) and gay men were a much safer bet whence working with some of the older and more vulnerable women they had in residence. And she could care less for his fashion sense, given that there was a set uniform, which she handed over to him in an employee storage area fringed with already running washers and dryers and stinking faintly of urine.

The two things she was not on board with, however, was the facial tattoo; an artistic rendering of a coiled snake situated just offside of his right temple (which she could do nothing about) and the sunglasses, (which she most certainly could.) She had tolerated his wearing them during his job interview some days earlier but hadn't expected them to make a continued appearance following his actually landing of the role.

"Prescription." Crowley had explained, staring down at the crinkly white pants and shirt he was expected to wear and wondering how he might make them look cooler. "Got a medical condition. Sensitive to light. Can't see a damn thing without them."

Rita might have wondered why Crowley wouldn't simply get a pair of normal glasses with transition lenses but decided to let it go. A pair of willing (how little she knew) hands was not worth questioning. "Right. Well, I'll be pairing you up today with one of our senior workers, Jeanie. She's been here five years, knows her stuff. She's on the verge of having a baby, which is why we're hiring at the moment. Need to train some other staff up to cover her hours."

"Wahoo." Crowley said, unenthusiastically, holding the pants and shirt up against the line of his body and staring down at them. Maybe a chain on the trouser loop. Black wrist bands.

"After you get changed, come and meet me in the front office and I'll introduce you to the rest of the team. You have your lifting certificate there, I assume?"

"You assume correctly." Crowley handed over a manila folder that had, amongst other various credentials he'd either genuinely acquired or maliciously fabricated, a certificate which allowed him to assist with physically assisting clients with getting out of bed, into cars, wheelchairs, etc. Rita took the folder, gave it a perfunctory glance before sliding it under her arm.

"Make sure and not dawdle. There's plenty of work needs doing first thing in the morning. We expect you to keep up."

She turned on her heel and left Crowley to his own devices. He smiled, his respect for the woman going up a notch. At least she wasn't pretending that she was going to like him. And such authenticity of character went a long way, so far as Crowley was concerned. Saved a lot of time at days end.

He dressed in the awful white shirt and trouser combination, storing his own clothes in an untidy bundle on the bench-top. (He might have just waved a hand in the past and magicked himself in an out of clothing but he still remained a little concerned regards the potential expiration of his powers). He hooked some shoe protectors over his boots, making good and certain that as much of the expensive material as possible was covered. (Shoes were the only clothing article which he actually went to the effort of purchasing. Everything else he copied and then miracled into existence. This was going to have to change, if he meant to be a little more frugal concerning the aforementioned powers _)._

He took a moment to look himself over in the full length mirror hanging on the back of the door. Wow. Now that was some next level awful right there. What he might have called a 'fuck free zone'. If he fucked, that is.

Crowley took his phone out from his jacket pocket. He hooked his thumb into the waistband of his crunchy trousers, jutted out his hip and flashed an unimpressed look towards his reflection.

An explanation first and foremost as to what he was doing:

Following the Armag-Don't even bother, Crowley had purchased for Aziraphale a smart phone. Their lives were about to get all the more unpredictable, especially given that Heaven and Hell definitely had them on their shit list and he thought it important that they were able to keep in contact with one another no matter where they might be.

He'd spent many a not so happy hour attempting to teach Aziraphale how to use the phone, something of which the angel took to like an armadillo to water; sinking spectacularly at every turn. After many drunken evenings all but hammering it in, Crowley had managed to teach Aziraphale how to call someone, check his voice mail and to text. This opened up a veritable world of opportunity so far as the demon was concerned. Moments such as this, for example.

He took a selfie, making certain that his eyes could be seen above the tops of his glasses. He sent it to Aziraphale, along with the caption: **_Look what you've driven me to. Hope you're happy._**

Aziraphale rarely looked at his phone during the day; he did after all have the land line in his shop. Plus, he might still be nursing embarrassment from his earlier concession of affection and simply trying to avoid reminding himself of it in any way possible. As such, Crowley was quite surprised to receive a message back almost immediately. It read:

**_You look very smart, dear! Best of luck on your first day!_ **

Crowley replied: **_I look like I'm being tethered for termites. This place smells like Hastur. I hate you >:(_**

The phone pinged almost immediately. Crowley had to smile at the response. **_Oh, you don't._** A second later and another message came through. ** _Now stop messaging and get to working. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it at dinner time!_ **Followed up by what was unmistakably, an egg plant emoji.

Crowley's brow lifted smartly into the lines of his forehead. Eggplant emoji? Well that didn't make a lick of sense. Just what the Heaven was Aziraphale suggesting he wanted to have for dinner? It couldn't actually be... what the eggplant emoji actually meant, of course. He sent back a message.

_**You don't know what the eggplant means, do you?** _

The phone dinged a second later. _**Well, of course! It means food :)**_

Poor darling ever so innocent Principality. Thank whoever that Crowley was the only one to whom Aziraphale was sending text messages, or else this might have very quickly dissolved into many an awkward situation.

_**I'll explain it at dinner, angel. Have fun today. Try not to miss me too much x** _

He had added the x before he had even thought about it and had sent the message with a reflexive thumb before he'd been able to amend it. _Dammit... got kissing on the brain, clearly._

Knowing Aziraphale, he likely would not equate the x with what it actually meant. He would probably think it was a generic sign off of some sort. Sure enough, the return message established precisely that:

_**I shall see you tonight, my dear x** _

Aw. Well, that was a little bit cute. Smiling, Crowley pocketed his phone and wallet, took one more tired glance at himself in the mirror and, with a disparate shake of his head, made his crinkly-crunkly way towards the staff office.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

Rita introduced him to all the members of the five strong day team. (Of which he was the only male-type creature present, just as Aziraphale had surmised). The girl he was to be paired with, Jeanie, was likely just shy of her mid thirties, heavily pregnant (Baby number one) and had the verve and annoying energy of someone much younger, who (if she hadn't been pregnant) would be more the likely to have something white and crystalized suspended from their nostril hairs.   
  
Her face lit up when Crowley was introduced to her and she went towards him, arms out in not so much an offer of a hug, but a ransom demand.

"Oh, but he is a spunky one, innin'he?" She remarked, hooking her arms about Crowley's shoulders and just about splintering his spine as she thrashed him from side to side. Hugs, Crowley had decided, were quite the best when they were dispensed by the soft and cosy delights of Aziraphale and not by the baby bedecked likes of random women. "That'll cheer the old girls up, nothing surer!"

Following his physical assault, Rita went ahead and explained their duties and what Crowley might have expected to encounter whilst undertaking them. At the end of her explanation, Crowley felt rather as though he were in fact completing the duties of an undertaker. It would have likely been less disgusting than what was in store for him on this: day dot.

The staff were required to use gloves and to be mindful of contact with fluids. Some of the residents had dementia and could be, as Jeanie so tactfully explained, 'difficult' to work with on account of it. One or two were known to spit, if the mood took them and some might even bite or take a swing.

Crowley got to experience all of this with one of the older chaps; a man in his advanced seventies known as Boris, who did in fact attempt to take a chunk out of Crowley's arm as they were assisting him in sitting up in bed to take morning medication. Crowley was tempted to bite back, but figured that this was hardly in the spirit of the human care profession. (Or so he had gleaned, at least).

It was impressive at all that the man had maintained enough of his original teeth with which to even deliver a bite, so he took a positive in that. Felt ever the more relieved for having his glasses on when Boris hocked up a lovely phlegm riddled gorbie right into what otherwise might have been his left eye.

He then tried to smack the Pill-bob containing his morning tablets out of Crowley's hand and upset the full glass of water the demon had been attempting to pass to him.

Jeanie observed, taking mental notes most likely as to how he was dealing with the situation. (The answer was barely and poorly). Crowley, being the type who might have under different circumstances have indulged his temper, let just the slightest hint of it dribble out, as opposed to the deluge he might otherwise have unleased. He had promised Aziraphale after all, that he would give it his very best try. And headbutting a senior citizen hardly seemed in the spirit of putting ones best foot forward.

"Okay. Listen up, ya grumpy old sod." He finally said, standing just out of biting, spitting and scratching distance; pill bob in one hand, glass of water in the other and mucus riddled spit sliding down the lens of his glasses. "No one likes getting out of bed in the morning. No one likes some chirpy upstarts coming into their bedroom and making 'em take tablets that probably taste funny and give horrible cotton mouth. As for someone else washing and cleaning you, I can't see what the big whoop is about. _I'd_ prefer someone else to bathe me of a morning. Give me a chance to wake up properly. But how's about we make a deal: You take the damn tablets without any of the spitting, mauling and kicking and screaming carry on we've seen thus far, we get you into the shower and dressed for the day and then we wheel you on out for breakfast and leave you alone a while. Let you get on with chatting up some of the old birds. Sound good?"

If Crowley thought that reasoning with a gentleman in the advanced stages of dementia was likely to result in a positive outcome for both parties, he was badly mistaken. Boris subsequently responded to the proposed agreement with two words; one of which was 'off' and then flipped himself back over onto his side and hurled the blankets around himself in a cacoon so tight, it would have put an ancient Egyptian mortician to shame.

Crowley was overcome with the near incontestable desire to grab the exposed corner of the blanket and forcefully spin the old fart out of his bindings.

"Right. Well. You know what? I'm just going to eat all of this medication myself." Crowley then made a big show out of pretending to take the medication out of the pill bob and placing it into his mouth. "Mmm. Yummy Seroquel. Yum yum yummy bisoprolol fumarate. Oh, you would have loved this mirtazapine. Going to do me the world of good, tell you that. And oh, what's this? Something to stop your heart exploding in your chest? Might have come in handy, mightn't it?! Too bad, straight on down my gullet, mmhh-mmhh-mmhh!"

Jeanie, who had until now, been enjoying the display thoroughly, chose at this point to cease her almost nearly smothered guffaws into the corner and show Crowley how to go about enticing Boris into taking his medication before they themselves were tempted to do so on his behalf.

She demonstrated how, when Boris was being difficult, they would flick the lights a couple of times and turn his television up, which would annoy him enough that he would sit up under his own steam. Once having done so, the idea was to talk to him for around five minutes, by which point he would have woken up some and would be less grumpy and more willing to take his medication. After this, he was far more amenable to being escorted into the shower for a wash and took only one half-hearted swat at Crowley during the process.

The next few clients were indisputably much less challenging so far as behaviours were concerned. Quite a few of them Crowley actually managed to summon genuine empathy for; especially one woman whom he assisted in lifting from the bed that she had wet during the night (on account of an improperly fitted continence pad) and who put her arms about his neck in such a trusting and somehow helpless manner that it wrought a little tickle to his tear ducts. (Not that he would ever have let anyone know that such a thing had moved him. It's where the glasses came in especially handy) _._

 _They're so bloody helpless_ , he thought, assisting with showering one of the very most feeble of the men in the wing that he and Jeanie had been assigned. He found himself moving with much more gentility than his usual broad gestures had previously permitted; lifting frail arms carefully so as to aim the nozzle of the shower hose up underneath them. _They need other humans just to help them continue living. Anyone could just walk in and hurt them and they couldn't do a lick to stop them._

 _How ironic that they’re being cared for by a demon,_ Crowley thought and then, in retrospect, considered the alternative. Lot worse human beings in the world than him, ironically enough. Even when he felt the slightest glimmer of historical temptation to perhaps kick the leg of a walking cane or indeed, cork in a mouthful of some of those medications (just to see what would happen) he resisted.

The demonic instincts were always present, always lingering below the surface but he had no further need to attend to them. Hell wasn't keeping score of his output anymore, after all. It was more his promise to Aziraphale which compelled him to keep forging ahead on the straight and narrow. Not to mention an indisputably stubborn mindset, which would not permit him to fail at doing something.

If anything, he wanted to prove to the angel that he could and would persevere, in spite of what resistance (and in what disgusting bacteria riddled form) he encountered. Even the arse pinching he received at the palsied hands of some of the more virile and uninhibited female residents, one of whom seemed to think he was the living epitome of a young Elvis Presley and looked quite as though she were prepared to have her wicked way with him; arthritis be damned.

After having showered, dressed and relocating the clients in their first assigned wing, Crowley was to assist Jeanie in getting up some of the older men and women in what they referred to as Wing C. This was where most of the residents who had difficulty with mobility were situated.

As Jeanie led him along to the select wing, Crowley found himself feeling just the slightest bit apprehensive. Age was something which would never grace him, being a demon of course, but he did in fact find it saddening and disturbing to see humans bodies wearing out whilst their souls remained trapped inside, quite likely the same as they had always been. 

He supposed the humans working in the Grange must have felt upset by the nature of their challenging work at times. Perhaps more so. There was a vulnerability in that; being present in the face of your own mortality.

Crowley quickly acquired a favourite amongst the more mobility impaired clients; a lovely old dear named Sylvia, who was in increased stages of dementia and didn't (and likely couldn't _)_ give two shits as to whether he had feelings or not and promptly gifted him the charming nickname of _'FAGGOT!_ ' Which she so intrinsically linked with such helpful advice as ' _FUCK OFF! FAGGOT!_ ' and _'DON'T TOUCH ME! FAGGOT!_ '

Crowley thought she was absolutely wonderful and made good and certain to put that little extra 'oomph' into the swing of his hips as he moved around her room; just so as to provide her with some additional ammunition. She seemed to appreciate this and Crowley felt a very strange, yet equally pleasurable sensation; that of having made someone's day just that little bit brighter. An extraordinarily strange thing for a demon to take pride in, but hey. He was never much of a demon to begin with.

Another of Crowley's tasks was to assist with the washing of the male residents. Not the females, obviously, though he did support Jeanie with holding one or two up whilst showering. None of this concerned him, or even made much of an impact, really. He'd had many a year to acclimatize himself to the human form.

It was always a little startling to witness the effects of aging, however. Not to mention those individuals that might have lost limbs due to illness or injury and one client in particular, who had had most of his bowels and stomach removed and was dependent on a colostomy bag.

All of this, rather than tiring Crowley out (or worse, boring him) resulted in the slightest feeling of pain setting up shop in the cage of his chest. _I can fix my body_ , he thought, stepping through the process of removing the colostomy bag and reaffixing a new one. Glancing ever so often into the sad eyes of the human that they were fairly much treating with the same regard as they might have done a plastic doll that had been manufactured on the cheap in some sweatshop in Taiwan. _You can't. You can't do anything but let other humans, who are paid to be here, do these things that are so deeply personal, so despairingly intimate and ever so sad, on your behalf._

A memory. Of a very bright, very good and very decent young man. Of nails being driven down and hard and deep. An agonizing death. An unfair death.

So much of humanity was unfair.

Would it have been less unfair, he wondered, if he had not tempted the Woman to bite the apple?

He asked Jeanie if he might finish the job by himself.

Least he could do.

**~X~**

* * *

Eventually, all of the residents had been assisted with making their way to the dining room for breakfast. Crowley was then tasked with helping to serve up the food and, finding it rather wanting (having sampled a spoonful himself, of course) cast a hand across each plate so as to improve the taste. The richness and the quality. So that each mouthful might indeed have tasted as though it had come direct from the Ritz itself. He thought Aziraphale might have been especially pleased this one.

He was required to support a number of the residents with eating and was especially keen to spoon feed Sylvia, who attempted to hurl her tray at him as he approached the table. 

Eventually, after having cleaned up and stacked plates in the dishwasher, sponged off some food stained jumpers and wiped a couple of faces, Crowley helped by placing a few loads of dirtied linen in the washing machines and was then advised that he and some of the other workers could take a quick break.

They made tea and coffee in the staff room and Jeanie showed him the little outdoor deck area, just off of the main office, where the staff who were smokers tended to congregate. Crowley made himself at home on top of the bench they had wedged into the modest space; nibbling on his leftover croissant from breakfast, sipping from his coffee and mentally rounded off as to how much longer he was going to have to stick it out. He checked his watch; only two hours into what he had been told was a nine hour shift. Almighty fucking _dammit_.

"That's a hell of a watch." One of the other workers (Alice, he recalled) remarked, lighting up a cigarette and dropping heavily down onto the door stoop. Crowley smiled, thinking this altogether much too appropriate an appraisal. 

The watch was custom made and relayed every time zone of the world and the time in a place in which the hour was always ‘Too late.’ He had switched this feature off some months ago; having not but a care as to how time might have been passing in that putrescent little shithole.

"That's one way of looking at it." His phone started blurting a cheery tune from the pocket of his crinkly pants and he reached in to yank it out. It was Aziraphale, of course. Who else would be calling but Aziraphale? He tapped the answer signal on the screen and brought the phone up to his ear. "What?"

Aziraphale made a distinctive 'hmph' sound from the other end. "Well that's a charming way to answer your phone."

"I'm working remember? If you wanted me around to talk to, you shouldn't have forced me into manual labour."

"I hardly _forced_ you, I just offered some sound advice which you were clever enough to take. How is it going, by the way? Are you enjoying yourself?"

"Yeah... I'm living the fucking dream." Crowley wasn't truly annoyed with Aziraphale for his situation. He had after all done much worse for people he liked much less in the past. That hardly meant that he was in the spirit of letting someone off of the hook, however. "Is that why you called? Just to gloat?"

"Hardly gloating." Aziraphale couldn't sound more warm and chipper if he tried. Which, knowing him as Crowley did, meant that he was quite obviously gloating. "I also wanted to remind you about that bottle of 1977 Graham you promised you would pick up for me after you finished your shift."

Crowley groaned, rolling his eyes back so far in his head he was quite surprised they didn't remain lodged there. "I know, angel. You reminded me last night, remember? Three times!"

"Well, I wasn't sure you would remember."

"I'm not gonna forget! If you're so damn worried about the bottle, there's nothing to stop you from catching a cab to the warehouse, picking it up yourself."

"Well... no. No, of course not." And now Aziraphale simply sounded so genuinely chastised and resigned and Crowley could see in his minds eye those soft lashes hemming about the edges of those sad little green peepers as he most likely tugged distractedly at his pocket fob. "It's just that... well you did offer. I don't want to be an inconvenience, of course..."

Crowley went to water with much greater propensity than he had ever done in the past. All that disconnect from Hell really was making him soft. "It's fine. Just have a little trust, yeah? I won't forget."

"Ah. Well, good." Crowley could hear the soft glow in Aziraphale's voice. It took so little really, to make him happy. "I'll see you tonight after you finish your shift. Have a lovely rest of the day, dear."

"Yeah. You too. Enjoy your jacket dusting." Crowley took the phone away from his ear and tapped the red symbol to disconnect the call. Alice, cigarette poised just by the corner of her lips, flashed him a knowing smile.

"Girlfriend giving you jack?"

Crowley gave a humourless scoff as he tucked his phone back into his pants pocket. "Close enough." And because Alice continued to look at him in that nosy way humans were so partial to, added: "My friend. Alex."

Because Aziraphale had refused to assign a human name to himself (apart form referring to himself as Mr. A.) Crowley had, during one drunken evening of proper contemplations, decided that he would gift him the honorific of Alexander Fell (Alex for short) because it just seemed to flow. Not quite so stylishly as Anthony J. Crowley, but not everyone could be expected to uphold such prodigious standards.

Alice gave Crowley a funny sort of look, flicking ash off to the side before realigning the filter with the edge of her maroon lipstick. "You must be very good friends if you refer to him as 'angel.'"

Ah. Crowley had been a bit remiss with this one. He had forgotten that humans often used the word 'angel' as a term of endearment. Which of course he did so as well, though his was more as a sort of interchangeable 'double entendre' but the context with humans seemed to almost be entirely that of the romantic persuasion.

He might have navigated his way around the conversation quite as easily as he always did (if anything he was a profligate bullshit artist) but then he had a stray thought as to how Aziraphale might react if he were, for whatever the reason, to run into Crowley's new workmates and be greeted as the demons would be 'boyfriend'.

The image of Aziraphale's round little face lighting up in a mixture of confusion, embarrassment and annoyance was such an utterly sublime one that Crowley knew right away that he needed to make this happen.

"My... _special_ friend." Crowley intoned, giving a slight smile in return that most anyone knew how to interpret. Alice for her part, looked delighted. As did Jeanie, who was standing just out of range of the cigarette smoke but who risked drifting closer just so as to be involved in the conversation.

"Oh, seriously _._ You got no idea how relieved I am! I mean, the whole time I've been here I mean, I'm like the only one who's gay!" And, because Crowley chanced a glance towards her belly, added: "My partner's a woman. I know, seems a bit weird but..."

"Not weird." Crowley said, quite honestly. The new world was a wonderful thing, for how it did, in its way, accustom itself to practices and desires and wants and needs that were as historical as were the pyramids. And he was a progressive being; always keen to have his eyes pinned forwards, to adopt and adapt to both creativity, adaptability and acceptance all round. "You have a donor?"

"Yeah." She nodded, glancing a hand over her very round stomach. From the slight peak at the base of her shirt, Crowley could see that her navel had distended. She was close to popping, all right.

"Your egg, or hers?" He had always been curious. Sometimes Aziraphale chastised him for it. Crowley could hardly see it as a sin, however. Never had. Part of the problem, no doubt.

"Her egg. My womb. Donors sperm." She glanced towards Crowley, somewhat tepidly and seemed to relax when she saw nothing but complete and undivided accommodation in return. "God... seriously you have no idea what it's like to have someone in the workplace, no offense Alice-" He colleague waved a hand to show that no such offence had been taken. "- who can kind of get what it's like to be... you know."

This was a difficult one for Crowley to answer honestly. (Not that honesty was really in his repertoire, but all the same _._ ) Because how exactly was he supposed to commiserate? To empathize? How could he explain to this enthusiastic young woman, who had incorrectly predicted that she had encountered an ally in her otherwise fundamentally hetero-dominated workplace that he wasn't in fact gay?

He wasn't straight for that matter. He was a supernatural creature from the foullest depths of Hell, who assigned physical aspects of gender only when it really suited him to do so and experienced attraction exclusively in relegation to another supernatural creature.

If anything, he supposed the only term what might actually apply to him was _Azirasexual_. He was holistically and exclusively drawn to Aziraphale; to the exclusion of most everyone else in the... well, universe, really.

Sure he could minimalistically appreciate the company of humans; where required. Never for much longer than was absolutely necessary. As for his once fellow demons and the winged wankers of Heaven, eh. There was nothing about them that was even remotely compelling. 

Aziraphale, in contrast, was in actual possession of a personality and he could certainly be quite the bastard when he wanted to be. He was all the world Crowley needed. Any feelings he might have experienced when looking at any other being of this world or or any other simply could not compare.

But of course he couldn't just up and explain all this to the ignorant likes of an otherwise well meaning lesbian human. So, he erred on the side of making life simpler and replied with what might have been a heart felt, "You're not wrong."

He was hardly in the habit of making humans happy but he didn't mind having done so in this instance. Except that it got Jeanie and Alice to talking about all their female dating woes (lesbian or otherwise and both of which sounded exhausting so far as Crowley was concerned and reminded him once again the added benefits of being Azirasexual) but he in turn got to experience the, as of yet, unexplored dynamic of getting to talk about Aziraphale (aka: Alexander Fell) _._

Which was actually kind of fun, given that he had only ever been able to talk to other people (aka: the council of Hell _)_ about Aziraphale in an exclusively negative construct. It was nice to waffle on a bit about all the standard ways in which the angel irritated, bugged and delighted the absolute Heaven out of him.

He barely took notice of the other staff members having 'joined' the conversation at some point, though was made fully aware of their presence when they started interspersing some of his stories or commentaries with near perfectly aligned chorus of ' _awww's.'_

"You got a picture of your beau?" Jeanie asked, having already shared an otherwise extensive collection of pictures of her own partner; stored in her mobile phone.

Crowley frisked his hand into his pocket. "Course." He said, digging out his wallet and flipping it open to show off the photograph of he and Aziraphale, which Aziraphale vocally detested and had made many attempts to miracle out of Crowley's possession. He had more on his own phone, of course but as if he wasn't going to take the opportunity to show this one around.

"Oh my God, he is _so_ 'effing cute!" Alice beamed, taking the wallet from Crowley and holding it up so that the group of girls could gather in around it. "He looks so... different to you."

"Understatement of the century." Crowley remarked, mostly to himself. He added then, for their benefit: "He _is_ pretty different. But we like a lot of the same things, surprisingly. Not that you would know it."

"You've got long hair in the picture." Jeanie said, tapping her finger against the plastic panel of the wallet.

"Took that shot around 1998." Crowley mused. "Had a hard time letting go of the eighties, me."

To be honest, Crowley had had a hard time letting go of the sixties and seventies; perhaps his very favourite twinned decades of all time. But this of course did not appear to line up well with the age in which he was currently presenting; which he believed to have been around his mid to late thirties (but most humans would accurately estimate as perhaps being definitely closer to his early forties).

He was distracted by the memories for a moment; fond times where high wasted velvet flares and silk shirts and platform shoes were the rage and no one cared if you couldn't dance with any semblance of skill (which was Heaven's fault really for hogging all the choreographer's) because they were all spaced out on magic mushrooms and Mexican lawn clippings and as a result everyone danced like there was a live wire set to their cerebral cortex.

It was a time in which Aziraphale had felt decidedly uncomfortable, Crowley remembered. All the glitz and glamour and disco and glow of the decade had been quite enough so far as he was concerned but the added bonus of the platform heels meant that in just about every interaction they'd had, Crowley near towered an extra foot or so over him. Something Aziraphale was never self-conscious about really but Crowley had relished to such a degree that it made it nigh impossible to appear unaffected.

Crowley showed the girls a couple more photo's on his phone; those that were more recent. The sharing made him feel a little warm. A little proud. It was... nice to feel proud. To show Aziraphale off to other people and to hear their positive appraisal in return. Crowley was, as he had always been, undeniably certain of the fact that Aziraphale was a being of distinct beauty beyond compare. Most humans did not perceive attraction quite the way that he did, however. He tried to explain it.

"Picture doesn't do it justice." He said, not even realizing that he had accepted a cigarette at some point. He took a puff, felt chuffed and relaxed and much a part of something as the process had once been. They'd smoked together in generations past, he and Aziraphale. He blew out smoke; relaxed once more into the act he had once worked so hard to forego. "He just... he walks into a room and... his smile... He has the most gorgeous smile. Goes right on up into his eyes. Loved him the first moment I saw that smile." The first time. The first _time_ he had ever admitted it out loud. To strangers. To strangers of all people. "The entire room can be dark and dank and dull as mud but he... he makes it better. Makes it warmer. Like a cosy fire, crackling away all merry in the corner. ...Well, not like the fire itself but the warm you feel when you're a comfy distance, you know? Listening to the soft crackling. That's him. The soft crackling. The warm."

All soft. All warm. Like the hugs. Like a blanket wrapped snug about your shoulders. Being tucked in tight under the awning of a safe arm. A safe wing.

"Picture doesn't do it justice. Not quite." Crowley looked at one of the photos on his phone. Of Aziraphale's nervous, scrunched nosed little smile. Looked to the subtle pink of his lips and thought back to how they had been pressed to the side of his face that morning. 

Wondered, briefly, what it might have been like if he had turned his head, such as he had wanted, and to have placed his lips to where his cheek had been. He could just as soon as feel his own hand, sliding about to press to the angel's neck. To cup to his shoulder. To pull him in, claim him. To be claimed.

Oh, it was so terribly human, wasn't it? A want of the body, of the brain in which the soul was encased, no doubt.

But a thirst, nonetheless. A deep, cavernous, wrenching thirst.

"I love the stupid idiot." Crowley said aloud. It was a monumental concession; one which he was aware he had always known, had always felt but a feeling he had never collated into words, into form. Hardly different really, to how he went about most things.

It might have shocked him, to admit it to strangers. But it didn't. It was... needed. He wanted to talk to others about those things he had held tight and true and painfully sequestered to the nearest and most painful borders of his soul. Things he had never been able to talk about; not to anyone.

Oh, it could be so terribly complicated, if one allowed it. Form, which was the words as much as it was the actions one took in expressing that which was the deep and intrinsic feeling of love itself. The Feeling. Feeling which might and often was viewed as adverse to the Form. The experience versus the expression. Quite as true, in the divide which existed between demons and angels, as was good and as was evil.

_I might indeed love you but I cannot ever apply some physical form to that love._

This was Aziraphale's struggle.

To wit, it was Crowley's struggle as well.

But for a while, in the presence of his new human work companions, Crowley was none of these complicated, ineffable things. Which was a grand relief, to be honest. For now, he could be, as imposed by the boundaries of their understanding; a man who was deeply in love with another man, whom he viewed the inert nose scrunching of and the bowtie wearing predilection of as being incredibly endearing and adorable and ever so simple to love and to desire. To thirst for and to want. To want to a degree so much deeper than the subverted layers of whatever permeated between the looks they cast off towards each other.

Lures which might have been yes nibbled upon, but never snapped up with confidence. With strength of conviction.

They likely pondered other things, his colleagues. Humans often did. Their minds invariably wandered, as such.

They probably wondered as to how they went about business in bed.

Crowley had wondered such things himself. He wasn't altogether certain how it might have worked. The late night television shows suggested that he was expected to have made a lot of noise, to have achieved certain angles with his legs (which, being at core a snake, was not entirely unattainable) and to have made frequent concessions to God (not happening) and done quite a lot swearing (definitely doable).

But beds were soft. Aziraphale was soft.

And an orgasm was nice. Very nice in fact.

They seemed an invariably good lineup, if a demon was to be honest with oneself.

Bed. Aziraphale. Orgasm. Sleep. Throw in a bottle of red somewhere betwixt all the other variables and it seemed to Crowley like there could not be a more perfect combination one could reasonably expect to squeeze into one's evening.

Not to mention, an angel having _sex_? Hot damn, if watching him eating larva cake was a turn on, the very thought of bearing witness to the intense degree of pleasure what orgasm wrought? It was quite enough to make Crowley weak at the knees.

Never mind that he might very well have been able to share in that feeling of pleasure in a more... direct capacity. Experience that same pleasure he himself attained through orgasm, combined with the intensity of pleasure he further experienced whence observing Aziraphale himself taking pleasure in some act? Perhaps, if such a thing was possible, through having achieved orgasm himself?

Crowley took another puff of the cigarette. And felt rather as though he could have used quite a few puffs more.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Today's Health Lesson - Demon's do not get lung cancer. A lot of humans, unfortunately, do. Partake of cigarettes at your own risk and discretion :)
> 
> Thanks as always to everyone for reading, following the story, all the lustful thoughts you entertain about the person who writes said story, etc. They are all very the much appreciated! If you would like to convey your appreciation by either commenting or kudo-ing, you are more than welcome to do so.
> 
> As always, with all my most infernal of loves and snekky cuddles bequeathed,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo
> 
> (Unless of course you value your personal space. In which case, I will nod gratefully at you from a respectful and appropriate distance).


	10. Or, in which Crowley makes a new friend.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You're fine then." Crowley said. Earnestly. Honestly. "A sin is only truly a sin when the non consensual act of committing it is truly enjoyed by the perpetrator. If you did not enjoy what you were doing and if by doing it, you were acting out of compassion for these women who you perceived to have been in genuine pain and despair then... no." He shook his head, puffed his own cigarette. Eyed a wilted, browning rose petal and quashed down the flagrant desire to pull the lazy plant into line. "No. Hell will have no claim to you. Not a good woman like you. There's nothing jagged in a soul like yours that they can hook onto and drag down. Rest easy. Heaven's angels will have you in their sights, nothing surer."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens is protected and preserved by the noble denizens of the Witch Finder Army. Any attempts to parlay the characters and or situations as presented in both novel and television show for charlatanism and harlotry alike, shalt find themselves punitively exorcised of by way of bell, book and candle. And finger, of course. One mustn't go forgetting that finger.
> 
> A/N: Hello again, everyone! Welcome to Part 2 of the once obnoxiously enormous original chapter 5! I once more remind you, gentle readers, that because of the face lift this story so desperately needs, comments in the comments section may contain spoilers. If you are an original reader, you already know what happens, so you are more the likely safe and may peruse the exciting roller coaster that is the comments section at your disposal. But new readers, please exercise caution. Because who would want any of THIS exciting drama to be ruined for them ahead of time? ;)
> 
> Good Omens random factoid (or rather, contemplation) of the day: If angels have true forms, why then did Aziraphale not assume this supposed true form following his discorporation? For that matter, how come all the angels in Heaven simply look human? And the demons look human, but rather the more down and out 'hard knock life' dumpster diving version of humans? Is it that the only true difference between angels, demons and humans is that the first two have wings and powers? And some vestal/damnable appropriations, such as gold makeup, face paint, lesions, scales, funny coloured eyes and... I don't know, bad shoe protectors? I actually kind of head cannon this, because the idea of true, alternative forms is just inherently too grandiose for me. It seems appropriate that gold face paint is pretty much as far as it goes.
> 
> Anyhoo, that being considered, please feel free to have a read! I hope that you enjoy :)

**~X~**

* * *

_~ **February 7th - 9:15am~** _

**_The Grange Estate Nursing Home - London, Suburbia... _**

Post break time. Back down to business.

Crowley played chess with one elderly gentleman, who whooped his arse in about five seconds flat and read a couple of chapters of some tawdry romance novel to another woman, who, thankfully, dozed off right before it got to the really steamy sections. Which was something of a relief, because he'd entertained quite enough racy thoughts for one day, thank you very much. Any more and he'd be needing some smelling salts to drag his rear up off of the floor.

He and Jeanie then had to race themselves back to the staff room to hook fresh laundry out of the dryers and weave them back over the beds which had, earlier that day, been stripped down. A fitted rubber mattress protector first of course and then every other layer following, plus fresh pillow protectors and covers. 

It all had to be done quickly and efficiently, which was a novelty for someone like Crowley, who was accustomed to simply waving his hand and having his bed fairly much make and clean itself. He got the hang of it in short order however, finding something amusing in all the rush-rush drama of the thing.

Jeanie was a down to earth girl, who laughed and joked her way through every assigned task but nonetheless treated the job with military efficiency. Giant belly and all, she would jump from one corner of the bed to the next, slamming the fitted ends around the mattresses with the precision and energy of a four man pit crew. 

Crowley wasn't at all sure how she managed it. He was already feeling knackered from the mornings exertions and he wasn't carrying around new life inside of his body.

 _Human women_ , he thought, watching as Jeanie tucked in the corners on her side of the bed and then toddled to the door, waving a hand urgently at him to follow along. _Are most definitely a force to be reckoned with._

_Especially the pregnant ones._

* * *

It was to stand that Crowley was in fact destined to meet not just one but two dynamic female forces with which to be reckoned that very day. The first had been Jeanie.

The second, was Gretchen De La Fontaine.

Gretchen, Crowley was soon to discover, was a superb human being. He had known a lot of them, in his six thousand years of existence.

But for whatever the reason, Crowley found that he liked this particular human being quite a great deal more than he did most any other he had spent time in the company of.

Gretchen was ninety-two years young, her skin the same dark as had been the first woman Eve's and she was blind in both eyes. She was of French origin, having moved to England only some thirty years prior with her husband. He had done most of the talking on her part, as her grasp of the English language was tenuous at best. 

She could speak just enough so as to get her needs across; which was good, as her husband had passed some years prior and was, as a natural side effect of being deceased, no longer able to serve as translator for her.

Gretchen was sitting in an armchair by her bedroom window when Jeanie and Crowley entered. She was warm in her greeting, letting Jeanie waffle on in that way Crowley was certain most people thought was as phony as Heaven. (Jeanie didn't seem phony really. She was naturally chipper, which was an emotion which was so wane in modern times it was never ostensibly trusted to be as austere as it certainly was. Aziraphale was one of the few who was able to effect it genuinely, for want of the fact that his entire being exuded that erstwhile light and warmth and love as effortlessly as most human beings exhumed gas).

About five minutes into what was very clearly a very one sided conversation, another of the workers came and asked if Jeanie could assist her with an emergency in the other room. Crowley thought it rather unprofessional for a trainee to be left unsupervised and in the presence of a client, but hey, wasn't like he was actually going to do anything. He just figured it worth taking note of.

It amused him to hear Gretchen exhale deeply as the door closed in Jeanie's wake. "She's a nice girl that one. But man oh man, she could talk the ears off of a..." She paused, looking annoyed at her memory and scratched an age spot on her chin. "Oh... this damned memory of mine. What is it you could talk the ears off of?"

"I don't know. Rabbit, maybe?" Crowley said, thinking himself very responsible in checking the condition of the bed linen, moving his palm over the fitted sheet to make certain it wasn't damp.

He heard Gretchen exclaim loudly from behind him. The reason being was that Gretchen had, from the moment he'd entered the room, been speaking in French. And he had, in turn, responded in French.

He had always been much more affluent in maintaining his multilingual skill set than Aziraphale, who sort of tended to let these things slip by the wayside, when he was not assigned to or living in any other country as opposed to England. Crowley was particularly fluent in French; a great many of his jobs had required him to travel to and from there. Lot of tempting got done in good old _Paris_.

"You speak French?" Gretchen had asked, extending her aged hands towards him. Crowley, smiling, though she could not of course see him doing so, responded with (in French, of course):

"Yes, ma'am. I lived in France a while. Happy to keep speaking it, if it makes you feel more comfortable?"

"Please. I never get a chance to speak in the old tongue anymore. The girls here are sweet, but they don't extend themselves very far, if you catch my meaning." She gave a little sigh, her face angled towards where Crowley was still checking over the bed. "Honey, I know exactly what you're doing and you can stop. I may be old, but I ain't that far gone yet."

Crowley smiled, pulling back the cover of the bed and perching himself on the edge of it. "Pardon my manners." His eyes cast to a framed photograph on the bedside table. A much younger Gretchen, with a man dressed in that ever so dapper style of the late 1940's. He picked it up, thinking it a rather strange addition to the bedroom of a woman who was, quite obviously, as blind as a bat. "This young man your husband, Gretchen?"

She chuckled again, her cloudy eyes cast vaguely in his direction. "Listen to you, talking like you've been around." She dabbed a finger towards where she must have supposed the picture to be. "That's my Alfred. He kicked off over fifteen years ago now. Still miss him every day."

"I'm sorry. These things are never easy." Crowley said, feeling his words very poor solace in place of a loved ones incomparable companionship. If her loss felt even half as bad as it had that awful hour he'd spent thinking Aziraphale was dead, then it was most certainly a pain he would not have wished on anyone. Except perhaps Hastur.

Gretchen reached across, dabbed her fingertips to Crowley's knee and gave it a then firmer pat.

"Never you mind, baby. We had us over fifty years together. Not everyone gets even that." Though her eyes were cloudy, he still thought they might have danced with mischief. Her brows certainly did. "You got yourself a lady friend, Mr... um... sorry, what did you say your name was again?"

"Anthony." Crowley said, having elected to go with his self-given name whilst volunteering at the home. He preferred for his actual name to be the exclusive go to now of Aziraphale alone; gave it a sort of permanence that way. "I have a life partner."

Well, it wasn't wrong, not _really_. Perhaps it wasn't quite in the same ballpark as what Gretchen was referencing but Aziraphale really did serve as Crowley's 'partner' in so few words. They had been companions for much, much, much longer than any married persons on earth could ever lay claim to. They simply lacked the intimacy that came from picking out curtains together.

"Ah. And what's her name?" Gretchen asked, not in the least sounding like an invasive busy body but rather as though she were just genuinely curious and (most likely) simply bored by having to put up with the same idle conversation from the same so and so's every single day. Crowley laughed softly.

" _His_ name, is Alex."

He wondered for a moment if Gretchen would have one of those reactions human's had sometimes to the witnessing of supposed non-traditional lifestyle choices (Not that he and Aziraphale were technically male) but Gretchen surprised him in hardly looking the least startled. She simply made an O shape with her mouth, showing off a set of nicely cared for dentures and reached across again to touch his knee.

"Oh, I'm sorry, love. I didn't mean to offend you. Sometimes it's hard these days to say the right thing."

"Don't worry about it." Crowley said, smilingly. Not that Gretchen could see his expression mind, but it was quite unconscious. He was simply enjoying himself now. "Take a lot more than that to offend a thick skinned old bugger like me."

"Good. Good." Gretchen paused a moment, tilting her head so that her ear was angled slightly upward. She leaned forward in her chair, lowering her voice. Crowley couldn't imagine why she felt the need to do such a thing, as it was hardly likely that any of the folks working at the home could speak or understand French. "Would you mind helping an old girl outside, sweetheart?"

"Am I... allowed to do that?" Crowley asked, which was a question he never thought he might have had reason to ask. Demon's traditionally did not give a wit as to what they may or may not be allowed to do. Those were mortal and or angelic constraints. For a demon any line drawn in the sand might as well be a written invitation to put your foot across it. If in fact a demon required an invitation to do as they pleased.

Gretchen made a grouchy, fussy sound, waving a hand dismissively. "I'm not in prison. Might feel like it some days. But I'm allowed to go outside, yes. Need my wheelchair, though."

"Well all right, ma'am." Crowley said, slapping his palms to his knees and swinging himself back onto his feet. "You ok with me lifting you?"

"Won't be going far if you don't."

She was cheeky this one. And her mind was still as sharp as a whip. Crowley found himself smiling as he guided the wheelchair over and set it up, brakes locked into place, opposite Gretchen's armchair.

He guided her up and out of her seat, just the way his training certificate said he knew how to and slowly eased her around so that she could slide backwards into the wheelchair.

"You feel as though you need a good meal there, Anthony." Gretchen remarked, one bony hand reaching up to glance a slight pet to the flat of his stomach.

"Would that I could get a fork in edgewise. Alex eats enough for a family of five." Crowley settled her into the wheelchair, gently placing her feet onto the support pedals and stood back, making certain that she was seated straight and comfortable. "There we go. Need a blanket for your lap or something?"

"Because us old biddies _love_ our crotched shawls." Gretchen said in such a salty and sarcastic tone it made Crowley chuckle to hear it.

"Well _excuse me_ for worrying that you might get cold."

"If you wanna actually help, be a dear and grab my fags from the bedside table."

Crowley made a show of gasping with exaggerated disgust. "You smoke?!" He stuttered dramatically, as though he had never chanced upon anything quite so scandalous in all his many years of existence. "But what about the cancer?!"

"I'm ninety-fucking- _two_!" Gretchen exclaimed, which set Crowley to laughing out loud as he nonetheless went to the bedside table to fulfil her request. "At this point, cancer would just shorten the sentence!"

Crowley retrieved the cigarette packet and the Bic lighter set next to it and closed the bedside drawer. "Fine. You can hold 'em though." He said, setting them down in Gretchen's lap and guiding her hand over to rest atop them. "I've already got enough to do pushing your arse around."

It was a risk he knew, to speak so candidly to someone he now had a duty of care around and certain professional guidelines and boundaries to observe but Gretchen continued to surprise him by actually laughing at his words. She was clearly the type who liked to have a bit of a shit stir and a tease and being able to openly communicate for once in God knows only how long was likely to be cheering her up.

No delicate flower this old bird, but a strong woman, hardened by human life and able to laugh at herself from any which angle you might come at her from.

"Kid, you're all right." She said, as Crowley took the wheelchair by the handles and knocked back the brakes with the heel of his foot.

"Whatever. You're a burden on society and you should be ashamed of yourself." They both chuckled at this one as Crowley pushed the wheelchair through the open doorway and steered it in the direction of the garden. "Right. Hold onto your dentures."

She huffed judgmentally. "Call this fast? I can soil my pull ups faster than this."

"Yeah, well don't bother, Ms Sassy. Had my fill of shitty knickers for the day, thankyou." Crowley started to push the wheelchair a little faster, though. There'd been something of a challenge in Gretchen's words and he was not a demon who ever turned down the opportunity to prove somebody wrong.

"Come on now, I'll be dead before we reach the garden!"

"Here's hoping." Crowley smirked, putting on another small notch of speed and sending the both of them bursting out through the double exit doors and into the small contained garden space.

There were some very well cared for plants and flowers in the garden, Crowley observed and wondered just how much yelling was required to keep the rose bushes in line and blooming so splendidly. There was likely a Gardner around here with a very sore throat and a half chewed through packet of Blackcurrant Throaties.

Crowley spun the wheelchair about on its back wheels, which Gretchen seemed to think an ever so marvellous thing. He was fortunate that no other member of staff had seen him all but flying down the hallway with one of the residents on this, his first day but Gretchen for her part seemed to have had a fun time of it.

And that had to be the more important thing, didn't it? Giving some joy back to people who probably spent the majority of their days being absolutely and unequivocally bored as fuck? Eating brown bread and drinking decaffeinated coffee with skim milk and not being allowed to mix their medications with a nice neat whiskey when they so desired? Throw in a couple of leaky pipes and larvae infested demons and the place would not be far removed from Hell itself.

"Okay. Where do you want to go?" He asked, glancing about the garden so as to find a suitably flat space on which the wheelchair might rest without rolling backwards and sending his elderly charge flipping arse over tits.

"Near the roses, dear." Gretchen gestured with surprising accuracy towards the fringe of rose bushes near the adjacent buildings wraparound veranda. "Do enjoy the smell of them."

"Might block out the smell of your fags." Crowley murmured, which resulted in his getting a light slap on the hand from Gretchen as he wheeled her over and perched her by the roses.

He locked the brakes in place and gave the wheelchair a wiggle to ensure that it wasn't about to move. Gretchen lit up one of her cigarettes and took a deep drag; typically coughing deep and cavernously after having done so. _Ah well,_ Crowley thought. _Free will and all that._

She gestured towards where she must have assumed Crowley to have been with the open ended packet. "Have one, if you like. You smoke Anthony?"

"Sometimes." He remarked, truthfully. Not often, however and never in the presence of Aziraphale.

They had made a pact in the eighties to quit together; the both of them having smoked since the early Roman times, as was keeping with human tradition.

Aziraphale had found it very difficult in particular; being for, whatever the reason, more at the mercy of the addiction than Crowley himself had ever been. Crowley could take or leave a cigarette. He was the type of individual that might pick one up, suck it in and not need nor want another for months on end. Yes, precisely. _That_ manner of bastard.

Aziraphale on the other hand was not this manner of bastard. His body, Crowley thought, must have possessed a strong addictive component; something in the human brain to which his soul had been assigned.

For many years, he smoked consistently and heavily; such that he had reached a point in the fifties where he felt he could taste it all the time and could smell it in his clothes and hair. Though he was able to continue to heal his human body, to prohibit the negative effects that smoking might otherwise have had (he was vigilant in bleaching his teeth, in particular) he no longer enjoyed being slave to the sensation and very much wanted to shelve it for good.

Crowley naturally had been supportive concerning this and they made a pact to quit together; making one another accountable in keeping tabs on their progress and their invariably slip ups. Crowley was, in fact, incredibly proud of Aziraphale for having stuck with it as long as he had. He had not gone cold turkey to begin with, but had cut back considerably and consistently until one day he took that last cigarette, smoked it and then never lit another. At least for himself.

Crowley, having not been so heavily addicted, had not nearly been quite as good in steering clear of the coffin nails. Every once in a blue moon, if he felt like it or felt he might have needed to do so in order to blend in, he would allow himself a cigarette. Never around Aziraphale. And, if he was due to see Aziraphale following his having had the cigarette, Crowley would change his clothes, chew mints until his tongue just about blistered out of his mouth and whack cologne on every spare inch of skin available.

Wow. It really was not much of a stretch to suppose that the two of them were in fact life partners, now was it?

Gretchen gestured again with the packet. Ever the enabler, it seemed. "Help yourself. Keep an old gal company."

"Oh, no. I can't take one of yours. Boundaries and all that. Thanks all the same." Wanting however to build a bit more rapport with the old girl, Crowley went ahead and miracled what was to be his second cigarette of the day into his hand and popped it between his lips. "Got my own."

He lit the end with a blaze from his finger tip and took a deep drag in. He felt a little guilty, his mind having cast back to his pact with Aziraphale. It always did whenever he lit up.

"Tell me more about this Alex of yours." Gretchen asked, not altogether helping in keeping Crowley distracted from the angel that he felt he was now somewhat betraying. "You been together long?"

"Six tho-" He stopped. Cleared his throat. _Something a bit more reasonable than that, you idiot_. "Six...teen years."

"Seems a long time. You sound young. How old are you?"

"Well, that's a bit rude." Crowley remarked. Not truly offended but wanting to have a bit of fun all the same. "How old are you? How much do you weigh?"

"Before or after they hose me off in the morning?"

Crowley chuckled, flicking ash off to the side and drawing in another cloud of poisonous vapours from the cigarette. He'd forgot how soothing it was. "I'm... thirty... nine..."

It probably wasn't at all accurate. Crowley wasn't much good at estimating human ages. But most people seemed satisfied in the past when he had given this answer when being asked the question as to how old he was. It was certainly more convincing than the time Aziraphale had replied to one curious individual that he was: "Twenty-one... ish."

"You've been together a while then." Gretchen observed, taking herself another puff of her cigarette and tapping a finger to the cylinder so as to break away the gradually forming worm of ash that had adhered to its tip.

"Yeah, well. Wasn't like there was much competition." Which was quite true of course, but even if there had been, Crowley knew full well that none of it would ever serve as being actual competition. He wasn't sure as to why he had felt the need to sound so flippant about it. Wasn't like he was the one ashamed of their relationship. Such as it was.

"What does he do?"

And here he was. For the second time that day, off and talking about bloody Aziraphale again. "Rare book dealer. Owns a bookshop in Soho."

"And he enjoys it?"

"Oh, loves it. Bloody froths on books. Always got his nose buried in some sort of nonsense."

"What's he like?"

Crowley pulled a face at her; though she wasn't about to see it of course. "Why all the questions, young lady? You gonna write his biography or something?"

"Excuse me for showing an interest!"

"You see me taking an interest in you?" They both laughed at this and Crowley sucked again from his dwindling cigarette. He couldn't quite remember the last time he had enjoyed someone's company so much. Well... aside from Aziraphale's, of course. "Well... he's an angel. He's warm, kind. Little bit on the chubby side. ...He gives good hugs."

"I'm sure he does." Gretchen said, with a knowing chuckle.

"That wasn't a double entendre." Crowley said, with a tired sigh. Thought a bit more as to how he might best describe Aziraphale in slightly less flowery terms than he had been employing use of earlier. "He's obsessed with food. If it's not a book in his face, it's a fully loaded fork."

"Ah. That's why he's chubby."

"You missed your true calling, Gretchen. You ought to have been a detective. What did you do with yourself? You know, before you were decrepit?"

She mused on the question a moment; her cigarette poised before her lips, mostly caved in but still lovingly attended to with lipstick. There often was nothing so classy in all the modern world, Crowley thought, as an elderly woman. Still strong enough and proud enough to attend to her appearance, whereas so many younger person's might have made excuses as to why they might let the practice slip.

He loved the way these older dears would formatively brush their hair into tight rigorous curls, whack on their 'crown jewels' as he would put it and still painstakingly apply their makeup. Even if it was just for the workers who were coming in to support them for the day. It was sort of a sign of respect to care for yourself, as such. He wasn't much different himself, really. He enjoyed a good preen.

"Well, I used to work as a doctor. ...a _discreet_ doctor. Performing... discreet surgeries."

"Ah..." Crowley said. Realising immediately. She had been a doctor trained in terminating unwanted pregnancies. "That must have been difficult for you."

"It was. But I felt as though young women who had gotten themselves in trouble needed someone in their corner. Someone sympathetic, who wasn't about to judge them." She drew in on her cigarette. Directed her unseeing gaze off to the side, over the rose bushes and slowly exhumed the poisonous cloud of smoke. "I wonder sometimes you know. I'm getting older, baby. That's when you get to wondering about things." She tapped free some ash. It cracked, splintered and drifted away in the light breeze. Some gathered on the arm of the wheelchair. "I never done regretted helping any of those girls. Saw far too much gratitude in their eyes. I was happy to take on the sin for them. Gets me to wondering though whether it might be enough to be sending me on down to Hell for it. Taking away all that life, you know."

"Did you enjoy it?" Crowley asked, dashing his fingers over the arm of the wheelchair and wiping away the cigarette ash. Her head snapped towards him so violently that something even lower in her aged spine popped as trapped air was displaced.

"You bite your tongue, child! Of course I could never enjoy such a thing! I did what I did to spare those poor girls the misery of being landed with something which they did not wish to be settled with in the first place! On some occasions, entirely against their will."

"You're fine then." Crowley said. Earnestly. Honestly. "A sin is only truly a sin when the non consensual act of committing it is truly enjoyed by the perpetrator. If you did not enjoy what you were doing and if by doing it, you were acting out of compassion for these women who you perceived to have been in genuine pain and despair then... no." He shook his head, puffed his own cigarette. Eyed a wilted, browning rose petal and quashed down the flagrant desire to pull the lazy plant into line. "No. Hell will have no claim to a good woman like you. Rest easy. Heaven's angels will have you square in their sights, nothing surer."

They were quiet a moment; smoke drifting up idly from their cigarettes. And then, Crowley heard her give the smallest, most ladylike sniff. Tears had poised at the edges of her blinded eyes and he felt the biggest knob for never having a handkerchief on his person. (This was what Aziraphale was good for, these sorts of situations).

"Thank you." She said, smiling in his direction and using the hem of her blouse to dab at the corners of her eyes. Crowley felt a flush light to his cheeks and went to his immediate, comforting standby of grunting disconcertedly so as to shield himself from embarrassment. "I don't know why, but when you say it, I feel as though it's true. God knows, enough folks have tried to convince me of it through the years." She breathed in some more of her cigarette. "You seem an old soul, Anthony. Something about you... you're a nice young man."

_Oh jeez. Oh no, not that word. Eugh._

_Nice._

_Change the topic._

"Got any little tackers of your own, Gretchen?" He asked, reaching out and taking hold of the browning rose petal. Stared pointedly over his glasses at the plant, making a gesture as though he were going to rip the petal right out. The rose bush gave a veritable tremble and seemed to almost shift in the dirt so as to pull away from the pointed glare of the demon.

"No. Alfred and I... we weren't able to."

"Sorry to hear it." Crowley said. He yanked out the rose petal and the bush recoiled, almost trembling against the brick wall which bracketed it. Crowley held the petal aloft and turned in a circle, displaying it to the surrounding bushes as though it were the severed head of an enemies King; executed upon a battlefield of ages past. A cold breeze went through the garden as the entire collective of plants took to fearful trembling.

"Oh, don't be. Never much cared for kids." Gretchen stubbed out her cigarette on the arm of the wheelchair and flicked the butt off somewhere indiscriminately. Crowley, still keeping resilient eye contact with the slackening plants, backed over to where the butt had landed and sent it over to a wall mounted cigarette dispensary with a flick of his finger. (Littering had once been a good standby, but it was hardly going to keep him employed now _)._

"They can be sticky." He responded, in deference to children. He was rather fond of kids, in his way. They were innocent, vulnerable little things; still working out the every which way of how they were going to conduct their growing's up.

But after serving as nanny to a child who he had supposed to have been the anti-Christ (and turned out to have been another child entirely) he was certain he could do without having human children within sticky fingered groping distance of him for some time.

"And noisy. And expensive. No, without children, Alfred and I were able to see the world. Back when I could see, of course." She gestured indeterminably over her shoulder with one of her thumbs. All her nails were perfectly groomed and Crowley had a thought that this was by her own meticulous attentions and not down to those of the staff. "Got a photo album inside. I can't see shit of course, but you're welcome to have a look. Don't bother humouring me if you ain't interested though. I got no patience for that."

"I wouldn't dream of humouring you." Crowley said with a genuine smile. He flicked the petal away, aimed a finger about at the collective gathering of bushes before then whipping it smartly across his own throat. All the plants shrank back as one, their roots about yanking out of the ground in their terror. "Ya know... I was real edgy about coming here but you've actually made me feel a whole lot better about it. Sharp as a whip, you are."

"Small wonder. All the meds I'm on." Gretchen laughed.

A thought then came to Crowley. Something which, if any of his once superiors in Hell had been able to audit it, would have found the content nigh demonstrably good and decent in most every facet and entirely and unimpeachably unsuited to that which a working demon ought be conducting his business.

"Hey, Gretch?" He gave a sly smile; one of those smiles which Aziraphale, in his own mind, thought to be ever so beautiful and ever so indicative of their being trouble afoot. "They ever let you out for day trips?"

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It's times like this that I really wish that I could draw. I would LOVE to sketch a picture of Crowley in his work duds. I just think he would look super cute in those white scrubs :3 Ah well, we can't have everything, sadly. We'll just have to use our imaginations!
> 
> Thanks as always for joining me for this section, my dears! If you enjoyed, please feel free to donate to my writing pipe fund in the way of a comment, a kudos or a bookmark. All of which really lift my tartan sock suspenders!
> 
> With all my love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	11. Or, in which an angel and a demon have an awkward conversation.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was a lie. Oh, it was a terrible lie. For they were friends, nothing more could be certain. But to say that they were simply friends? There was nothing simple about whatever it was that they shared. He was whitewashing what they both clearly recognized as being a connection that was vastly and indisputably more intense, more passionate, more significant.
> 
> He knew this. Aziraphale knew it all too well. But he couldn't... he simply couldn't abide the classifying of whatever their relationship was as... romantic love. The implications that came with such a thing were altogether too staggering. He wasn't able to process them. The very thought of it evoked a terror in him so profound that he felt it might rankle the borders of his very soul into irreparable pieces.
> 
> For he did love Crowley. He loved him with a propensity which extended far beyond the means by which a natural angelic love might be accepted. He loved him in ways he did not know how to express; to convey by some means more tangible, more meaningful than an earthly smile...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: As Good Omens is not the property of my inoffensive self, I garner no profits from the writing and or distribution of fanfiction. I am happy to share this story with you fine people and if you choose to come on this journey with me then the more the merrier :) (Quietly curses the lack of support for fanfiction writers and the fact that no one will ever buy her a cup of coffee in exchange for content. Or glass of wine, rather :P
> 
> A/N: This subdividing is both exhausting and cathartic at the same time. Can't lie; kind of loving it, though :) Thanks as always to everyone who is engaging with the story; I appreciate every single one of you that drops in for a perusal. That being said, I can't think of a random factoid to share with you right now, so I'll just say; hope you enjoy the chapter!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~February 7th - 5:14pm~** _

**_A.Z Fell & Co - London Soho... _ **

Aziraphale closed up shop at 5:00pm on the dot.

It had been a productive day. So, as you might imagine, this meant that angel was, as a result of said productivity, not at all in the best of moods.

Productive days meant that Aziraphale had successfully accrued an income. These days were required, of course, so as to keep being able to pay the rent, add to his savings, live life and all the rest. He could hardly be singularly reliant on conducting research, text translations, appraisals and chasing orders for ring in customers after all. _(Though these were the jobs which most often paid the very best, such that it was exceedingly rare for him to even require so much as cracking the antique till which was perched up, more as a decorative feature, upon his counter top)._

Today had been one of those, as he often so tentatively referred to it in his head as, 'Concession days'. Days in which he conceded to letting go of some of his books, not quite so prized as the rest ( _absolutely no first editions_ ) in exchange for, what Crowley had once informed him, was considerably a lot less than what they were invariably worth. Being an angel, it was quite impossible for him to overcharge, of course. And it made his stomach hurt to even think about his benighted customers being out of pocket in some way shape or form. They of course hadn't the luxury of six thousand years existence in which to save up a comfortable nest egg. He _did_. It was nowhere in the same realm as Crowley's diabolically manifested... well, to refer to over nine million pounds of savings as a nest egg was sort of like referring to a bagpipe as a humble sounding kazoo, wasn't it?

In short, Aziraphale had permitted the sale of over twenty-five books that day. He felt the loss of each much as he might a metaphorical kick in the teeth with a steel capped boot. It would of course be many years before he might ever see them again; perhaps buying them back or hunting them down at deceased estates at what not. _It wasn't goodbye forever_ , he would remind himself as each book was sequestered away in the little brown paper bags he provided, out the door and into life with their subsidiary owners. _Just goodbye for now._

So when Crowley dragged himself in a little after five, looking much as a wash cloth does after it has been wrung dry by a champion weight lifter, Aziraphale felt significantly more the cheered for seeing him. As he approached, Crowley took one look at his downcast face and set aside his own innate weariness for the moment.

"Had to sell some books today, huh?"

Aziraphale gave a little nod, his lips pressed together tightly in a poor attempt to keep them from trembling. Crowley sighed, setting down the bottle of wine that he had fetched for Aziraphale as promised and opened his arms to the gloomy angel.

"Come on then. Bring it in."

Aziraphale didn't at all mind the hugs these days. He especially appreciated this one. He wasn't even bothered by the slight whiff of ammonia _(and something else which was vaguely familiar)_ coming off of Crowley's crinkly work uniform.

"Never the mind. There's little to do for these sorts of things." He remarked, easing himself back and placing his hands to each of Crowley's shoulders. He looked him up and down. Petted a hand to the demon's sleepy looking face. "What a very long day you have had, my dear. You must be terribly tired." He took a step back, gesturing to the demons attire. "Just look at you all professional in your work uniform."

"It's mine, you know." Crowley grunted, swanning on past Aziraphale and heading straight for his usual safe nook in the corner settee. He collapsed down onto it, throwing his booted feet _(a strange combination whence coupled with the starched white of the uniform)_ over the arm and rubbing his fingers across his forehead. "Need to take care of it. Wash it and everything. Anything happens to it, I gotta play for a replacement set."

"How will you _ever_ cope?" Aziraphale teased, placing away the bottle of wine and removing the last of the money from the till. He piled it into a small bag which he then transferred to the equally as petite safe he kept in the back room. He called out to Crowley as he went about his end of day business. "I can wash it for you if you like. Otherwise I'm sure you could just use magic to keep it in tip-top condition."

Crowley curled his lip, thinking there was nothing about his new work uniform which might ever constitute the use of the phrase 'tip-top'. It was a kind offer, however. Aziraphale might have been the type to outsource his personal care requirements but he was fastidious when it came to maintaining his personal belongings. This was his little niche of self-sufficiency of which Crowley, in turn, was notoriously lazy regards.

Aziraphale was the sort who would make his own bed each and every morning, wash and rotate linen and clothing and use all the right sorts of things in all the right components of the washing machine. Crowley had never even _used_ a washing machine, though he had remembered thinking that they were yet another wonderfully clever invention that would save the dear humans a great deal of time. Looked as though the time had come for he himself to get familiar.

"Mind if I just pop into your laundry, strip it off and whack it through the machine now?" Crowley asked, referring to the tidy little laundry room relocated at the rear of the shop. It opened out into a small, equally tidy courtyard, where Aziraphale would hang most of his clothing on a wall mounted clothes line. He had a functional dryer, which he would make use of in the colder, rainier months but he preferred to air dry his laundry, which resulted in a cleaner smell and less issues with irritants. Crowley could hardly believe he was suddenly in a position where any of this nonsense was relevant. Nothing doing for it. Little things like this could be done by hand. No point in potentially wasting magic on something so straight forward.

"By all means. So long as you don't wander out naked again." Aziraphale smiled as a couch cushion hooked through the open doorway, landing just offside of his left heel. He locked the safe, picked the cushion up and returned out to the study area, placing it back on the couch by a grumpy and embarrassed looking Crowley. "There's a box of laundry powder by the machine. Do you need me to show you how to use it?"

"Eh... might be a good idea." Crowley said, visions of a foamy tidal wave flowing out through Aziraphale's back door and surging down the street, sweeping away most of London in the process and taking his work uniform along for the ride.

Aziraphale lead Crowley into the laundry and glanced discretely off to the side as the demon wiggled out of his work clothing, standing then by the washing machine in his boxer shorts, singlet top and black, calf length socks. Aziraphale found himself chuckling at the sight, for it was somewhat charming in its way. Crowley was usually so well dressed and invested a great deal of his identity into his clothing. To see him standing around in his underpants, with his socks pulled up as unnecessarily high as they were... well, there was something strangely humanizing about it.

He took the bundle of proffered crunchy clothing off of Crowley and opened the door of the front loader to toss it inside. He got a whiff of that earlier smell again. The ammonia and... something else. He held the uniform closer to his face and took another deep sniff. Crowley drew his lips back from his teeth, hissing his concern.

"Oh... I wouldn't do that. They probably smell of piss and shit and Satan only knows what else."

"And cigarette smoke." Aziraphale said, the pieces having finally clunked together in his head. He glanced up at Crowley, saw the guilty shifting of his yellow eyes behind his glasses. "Have you been smoking again?"

Crowley was quite obviously ( _and quite poorly_ ) attempting to shirk the truth. "Oh... no, of course not. I was hanging around with a client who was smoking. Smell must have gotten into the fabric."

"Mmm-hmm." Aziraphale murmured, entirely unconvinced. You would think that a demon who had been lying long before there was even a word used with which to describe the practice, might have done a better job of it. He tossed the clothes into the machine and straightened up, gesturing for the demon to come closer. "Right then. Let me smell your breath."

Crowley backed up smartly, brows crinkling in to show quite what he thought of Aziraphale all but sticking his nose into the cavern of his mouth. _(For this was precisely what he had done in the old days when they were pulling each other up for any little slips)._

"What? No!" He internally cursed himself for not having stopped for gum on the drive home. His tongue felt filmy as well, some build up most likely from the cigarettes. He'd had a few more in the afternoon, stupidly. "I don't need your blessed nose all up in my mouth, thank you very much! And for that matter I'm not some child you can take by the hand and steer into the corner for time out when it suits you! I am a grown demon, who makes his own choices and if I so choose to have a fag from time to time, then I jolly well shall!"

And Aziraphale made such an accommodating and yet equally disappointed face in return to his tirade, that it made Crowley feel ever so petty and contrarily childish as a result. He might have apologized immediately for his tone but the angel simply raised a hand, giving a small smile to indicate that it wasn't at all necessary.

"You're right. It is your own choice if you wish to go back to smoking or not." He turned back to the washing machine, opened the left side shelf and reached over for the box of laundry powder. He popped in a good scoopful. "If you choose to do so however, all I ask is that you please refrain from doing so around me. You know how hard it was for me to quit." He groaned, rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. Took a deep, staggered breath in. "Lord, even the _smell_ makes me want one."

"I'm sorry. There's a few smokers at work and one of the clients wanted me to smoke with them and..." Crowley trailed off, feeling ever so much like the world's biggest most complete and most inconsiderate shithead. "I'm _really_ sorry."

Aziraphale glanced his way, took note of how big and wide the demon's eyes looked behind his glasses. How genuinely sad he seemed for having caused the angel this minor distress. What a turn about face, all things considered. Upsetting an angel would have once scored him major points with Hell.

Aziraphale smiled, finding, as he so often did, that it was impossible to stay cross with Crowley when he looked so terribly vulnerable. "Oh, it's all right." He leaned over, petting his palm to the side of the demon's face. A demon who disguised his pleasure at being attended to ever so poorly. "You're impossible to stay mad at with those enormous off putting eyes. Now, watch closely so as you can do this yourself next time."

He showed Crowley the correct amount of powder and fabric softener to use. _(Lord knows the starchy uniform could use with some softening up)_. He turned the dial then to the correct setting but did not switch the machine on right away, turning instead to Crowley and clapping his hands together.

"Right. Before we go and do that, why don't you go and have yourself a nice shower? You probably need one after today. Help relax your muscles and whatnot."

Aziraphale had a small bathroom located just offside of his bedroom. Crowley had used the shower a number of times; usually after a night of drinking when he had seen fit to pass out on the settee. On one occasion, he'd even had the cheek to run himself a bubble bath; which he'd lounged about in whilst Aziraphale had been otherwise occupied working out front of the shop. He'd subsequently found the demon, asleep under a decadent mountain of bubbles, one hairy little leg propped up on the lip of the bathtub and a glass of red wine still resolutely clutched in his unconscious fingers. Crowley had about taken his fingers off when Aziraphale had attempted to remove it.

"Shower sounds good right about now." Crowley muttered, bracing his hand to the back of his neck and cracking some of the joints. His muscles really were sore, as he wasn't habitually accustomed to actually _using_ them. "You don't mind?"

"Since when do you care? Honestly." Aziraphale smiled, smacking his palm to Crowley's backside to send him on his way. "Go and get washed up and put on something comfortable. I'll pour you a drink and then you can come and tell me all about your first day."

He couldn't see it of course, but a dopey smile had wormed its way onto Crowley's face when he had felt the glance of Aziraphale's hand against the cheek of his arse. He knew full well that the angel had not distributed the smack in an intentionally sexy way, but in more of a warm, familial manner, so as to usher him along.

That wasn't to say that he couldn't enjoy it, however.

Crowley loped his way across the bookshop, some might say a little dreamily, _(though he would hate to hear it assessed as such)_ and passed through Aziraphale's bedroom and drifted on into the ensuite. He cranked the shower handle as high up into the 'Hot' setting as it would go, waited until steam had just about choked out any remaining visibility in the small room and then interred himself beneath the boiling stream. Perfect. Hot enough perhaps to boil most regular human beings eyeballs in their skulls but just ever so good and dandy, so far as a demon was concerned.

He 'borrowed' a bar of Aziraphale's soap; some sort of lavender scented nonsense with goats milk for sensitive skin. Some of his chest hair got stuck to it and he spent an extra couple of minutes picking it clean, rather than leaving behind something which sooner resembled a half dead ferret than it did a bar of soap. He was terribly thoughtful these days, wasn't he? Once upon a time he would have considered a point of immense pride to have left Aziraphale's bathroom in much worse a condition than that in which he had first encountered it. He even had the decency now to dry himself in the shower, so as not to get water all over the tile floor. He even put his towel in the wash basket, rather than leave it lying in a bundle in the corner.

The clothes that Crowley had started his day in were in the car still. He felt he could spare a bit of magic just this once _(and spare Aziraphale having to once more witness the spectacle of him drifting across the room in his underwear_ ) and retrieved them with a snap of his fingers. He dressed by hand, this time. Wanting to get a bit more accustomed to it. He quickly realized that leather pants were invariably much easier to put on and take off with the aid of magic and was ever the more grateful for his having not left any water on the floor, for he would have likely slipped and cracked his head open; what with all the jumping about and wiggling and squirming he was doing in an effort to slide his lower body into the pants.

It took a fair whack of negotiation, but at long last Crowley was victorious and snapped his belt through the loops of his pants with a feeling of pride that hardly seemed in context to the task he was actually conducting. His shirt was much simpler, though he did wear it tucked in, which required him having to forcefully wedge the tails of the shirt down into the band of his tight pants. He slung his jacket on and slipped the silver cord he wore as sort of an aesthetic feature over his head and looped it in a loose knot somewhere low on his chest. He left the top few buttons of his shirt undone as usual and then perched on the toilet seat so as to fit his shoes on. Dear... whoever. How humans got anything done was beyond him. Getting dressed right out of the gate was an exhausting, time consuming and potentially dangerous task. How they had the energy to put a spoonful of cereal in their mouth following the act was admirable.

Pleased with his efforts, Crowley swept his hair back off of his face _(sneaked a little magic into styling it)_ and sauntered on out into the study nook, feeling a Hell of a lot fresher and a blessed sight more relaxed than he had earlier. The glass of 2008 Loire Valley Sauvignon Blanc Aziraphale handed him was ever so much the cherry on top and he took a large, muchly obliged gulp from the glass, moaning and making a rather grandiose gesture towards the ceiling as he did.

"I put the washer on when I heard the shower switch off." Aziraphale said, smiling at Crowley's typically over dramatic reaction to the proferred libation and taking a sip of wine for himself. "Feeling better?"

"There are _no_ words." Crowley set his glasses down on the table beside the settee, drifting over to Aziraphale and tapping first the tops of the glasses together and then the bases. "Cheers."

"Here's mud in your eye."

"Always a weird saying that one, wasn't it? Still not entirely sure what it means." Crowley resumed his previous pose upon the settee, kicking his boots up on the arm and lazing his head back across the one opposing. He sipped from the wine again, sighed softly to feel it working its magic on the otherwise sharp corners of his mind.

"Well now, don't keep me in suspense." Aziraphale stated, settling down in his study chair and swinging it about so as to face Crowley more the properly. "Tell me how things went today!"

Crowley rounded off the days events, keeping it strictly mum as to just how much of that day had been spent talking at length about Aziraphale, of course. The angel observed the shift in Crowley's voice as he talked. He seemed, for the most part, genuinely enthusiastic and excited for the work he had done. The people he had met, in particular. It pleased Aziraphale greatly to see him as such; to have taken pride in the doing of something good and decent.

"There's this one old bird there." Crowley was saying, having already topped up his now second glass of wine. Aziraphale was still properly savouring the first, of course. "Fantastic old nutter."

"Oh, yes?"

"Gretchen her name is. French gal. Great sense of humour. Sharp as all get out." Crowley chuckled, slung his arm back behind his head. Toes waggling from side to side in that way he did when his energy levels were up. "We're allowed to take the clients on field trips, so long as two workers are present. So, you know what I did?" He sat up, staring ever so brightly and enthusiastically at Aziraphale. "I took her and one of the other workers out to the _Ritz_ for lunch."

Aziraphale felt just the slightest flicker of something stirring in his chest, which he surmised to be a not quite altogether angelic feeling. It surprised him, actually, to hear that Crowley had taken person's other than himself to the Ritz. That was sort of... well, it _wasn't_ officially, not _really_ , they had never had a discussion in which they openly declared the Ritz to be, exclusively the place in which _they_ went to dine. It's not as though Aziraphale had specifically requested that Crowley not take anyone else there. There were no rules about such things. And why on earth should there be?

It was reasonable for Crowley to have done so. So why then did it make Aziraphale feel, ever so slightly, betrayed?

"Well." He said, taking great strains in keeping that most inappropriate emotion out of his tone. A careful observer might have noted however, that his smile was not quite reaching his eyes, such as it usually did. "She must have felt _very_ special. I'm surprised that your workplace allowed you to spring for such a thing."

"Eh. Used a bit of magic to pull it off. Worth it though. Said she'd _never_ be able to afford to go to any place like that." Crowley might be forgiven for being a little vague on this occasion. He knew Aziraphale well enough to pick up on his otherwise subtle variations of mood. He simply wasn't attending to it such as he might ordinarily have done; believing that Aziraphale was only likely to have seen the positives in Crowley having done such an uncharacteristically good thing. He did in fact believe that Aziraphale would have been proud, rather than near steaming with some manner of angelic passive aggressive covetousness. "Even managed to get her up for a dance. She's got pretty good form, the old girl. Can't dance for long. Got some issues with her hips and what not. Still, not a bad shuffle."

Aziraphale's smile flickered out as though it were a candle flame snuffed from existence by a passing draft. Something else drifted up from deep inside of him. _Envy._ Most definitely not an angelic feeling. Very contrarily not at _all_ angelic.

"You danced with her at the Ritz?

"Mmm-hmm. Said it'd been years since she'd gone dancing. Even sprung for a decent bottle of bubbles for her. She'll be the talk of the nursing home tonight, nothing surer." Crowley sipped from his wine, gazed up at the ceiling. Smiled ignorantly to himself as, just across from him, an angel was embarking on a rather intense and protracted existential crisis. "You know, I wasn't sure at first, but I think I'm actually going to like it there. The girls I'm working with seem a solid bunch. Chatty Cathy's the lot of them, but hey, like I can talk." He swung up in his seat again, bringing his feet down to the floor and pointed to Aziraphale, who whipped a smile back onto his face with the sort of speed which might put a peregrine falcon to sour lament. "Oh, speaking of which, got a slight change of plans for tonight."

"Oh, yes?" Aziraphale said, his smile becoming all the more tight lipped as he got to imagining that Crowley had invited his new friend Gretchen along to dinner and had her waiting, hopefully with a window cracked, in the Bentley for them. It would not have surprised him in the least.

"Some of the girls I work with have invited me out tonight. Spot of karaoke."

"Oh. ... Are you going to sing?"

"I might." Crowley frowned at Aziraphale's somewhat pained expression. "Why are you pulling that face? I've got a good voice! I was always elected tenor whenever we had to sing the hymns back in Heaven!"

Aziraphale waved a hand placatingly. "No, no, you mistake me. You do indeed have a lovely voice. It's just... well..." He gave a light airy shrug, doing his utmost to pretend as though he wasn't bothered by any of this ( _though he, for whatever the reason, clearly was_ ). "I never supposed karaoke to really be your thing. You've never shown much interest before."

"Yeah, well, _you're_ the one always telling me to start trying new things. Besides, there'll be alcohol there. Everything's tolerable along with a good stiff drink or two."

 _Or, most likely, a six or a seven, knowing you._ "I see." Aziraphale murmured, this time entirely unable to prevent the strain from creeping into his voice. He flicked some imaginary lint off of one of his knees, feeling that perhaps it was as a result of his having had to let go of some of his books that day, which was resulting in this uncharacteristic feeling of malaise. "So... I shall be attending dinner... in the company of _myself_ this evening."

Of course Crowley could hardly ignore this. It was, par for the course, just about as close to a temper tantrum as the otherwise composed angel was capable. "Don't sulk, they said to invite you along. Wanted to meet you. Someone only knows _why_."

This struck Aziraphale as being a little odd. Why indeed would Crowley's work mates extend an offer for him to have been included in their evening? Let alone feel that some 'friend' of Crowley's was someone that they had any reason at all to meet. He glanced at Crowley sidelong, narrowing his eyes slightly.

"Have you been telling stories again?"

Crowley never much wasted time with looking ashamed of himself. Now was no exception. "Don't have much else to talk about besides you. Girls said they had food at the bar. Maybe we could just go sub-fancy for one evening, eh?" He gave Aziraphale that usual long, lingering look which more often than not got him his way when he really turned the heat up. "They've got some fancy-arse cocktails there from what I hear. Got a _Vieux Carré_ on the menu. Love yourself a _Vieux Carré_ , you."

Aziraphale did indeed love a _Vieux Carré_. It had all the zest and perfectly balanced components of a Manhattan with just that little extra flavoursome sugary punch. It had been quite a while since he had partaken of one; with the exception of a rather knock-kneed interpretation Crowley had attempted one evening, which fairly much amounted to rather expensive rocket fuel.

 _What the hell,_ he thought. _If Crowley can push himself out of his comfort zone, then the least I can do is shake up my own routine for a bit. Even if it is whilst sitting in a peanut strewn bar, listening to an endless parade of excessively more drunken humans belting out dreadful twentieth century songs._

"Well, I'm game if you are." Aziraphale said, a smile of far more genuine warmth sliding back up onto his face. Crowley clapped his hands together, bouncing up out of his seat and slugging back the last gulp of wine remaining in his glass.

"That's the spirit. Should be a right laugh, eh? Just an FYI, you go by Alex where they're concerned." He waved a hand airily, uncaring as he picked up his glasses and slid them back on, depositing the empty wine glass in their place. "Oh, and I told them that we're partners so just, you know, _roll_ with it."

Now this made Aziraphale just about choke on his own last sip of wine and he was required to put a hand to his chin to wipe up the few sputtered drops that had erupted from between his lips.

"You told them that we're _what?_ "

"That we're... you know? Partners." Crowley fluffed up his collar, rolled his shoulders in a plainly careless manner. "In the... human, romantic sense."

"Why would you do that?" Aziraphale asked, genuinely and completely shocked by the demon's audacity. Concerned as well by it. The angels' thoughts were flying out in a hundred different directions; like a spattering of punch drunk doves loosed from a dark box with a plethora of cats swiping at their tail feathers. It aggravated him more so, that Crowley continued to look plaintively unbothered by what he himself viewed as being more than just a little bit of an impertinent act.

"Seemed the easiest way to explain it at the time, angel. Some of the staff heard me talking to you on the phone today and they sort of just..." He gave that insolent looking shrug again. That shrug which Aziraphale was really rather starting to take exception to. "-drew their own conclusions."

"Yeah... and you didn't think to attempt to amend those conclusions rather than... expand upon them?"

Now Crowley was the one who was starting to look annoyed. "They heard me call you _angel_. What was I supposed to say? That you're _actually_ an angel?"

"You could have just said that we were _very_ good friends."

"Uh-huh." Crowley said, sarcastically. Giving Aziraphale a look which said that he fancied that the aforementioned angel was in fact being very, very stupid. "Very good friends who call each other _angel._ They would have just taken that for me being in denial. And if there's one thing that Anthony J. Crowley does not stand for, it's denial." He thought about this a moment. "Well... denial and raspberry flavoured Pepsi, that's the two I stand strong on."

Aziraphale shelved his irritation just long enough to share in the much deserved incredulity surrounding raspberry flavoured Pepsi. "I _know_ , what is with that?"

"I don't _know_! An abomination is what it is. Had to have come from your... previous side _that_ one."

"I was quite convinced it was from _your_ side! Right up there with criminal defence lawyers and airport security guards."

Crowley dashed his fingers through the air, drawing a metaphorical veil over this trek off topic. "Anywhoo, it just seemed the easiest way to explain our... relationship so that they would understand it." He put his hands in his pockets, gave the angel a little look before casting his eyes away, all but scuffing his toe against the carpet in a somewhat categorically typical gesture of awkwardness. "I mean... if two human males spent all their time together like we do, going out to dinner, listening to classical music, having pictures of each other in their wallets-"

Aziraphale brought a finger up sharply. "You're the only one who has a picture in your wallet."

"Oh, that's right. You use the clear pocket for your frequent diners club card." Crowley amended, trying and failing to not feel offended by this. You would think he would at least have slotted in higher than a bloody plastic card which might, with enough points, score Aziraphale a free meal once every couple of months or so.

"Why couldn't you have just told them the _truth_?" Aziraphale asked again, shock still with the sudden dawning realization that he was about to come face to face with a whole mess of people who believed that he and Crowley were likely... carnal with one another. He felt such a pure rush of embarrassment at this that he was quite certain his entire flushing face could be seen from the international space station.

Crowley gaped at Aziraphale incredulously. "The _truth_? What _truth_? Oh, hello new human work colleagues. Yes, I am a seven thousand year old demon who has formed no other significant attachments to anyone exempting a seven thousand year old angel, whom I met in the Garden of Eden whilst tempting mankind to commit the original sin. Heaven and Hell assigned us to earth respectively and we bonded over the fact that we were the only two creatures who could possibly understand one another's situation and we both share a mutual appreciation for fine dining, expensive wine and classical music. Would you kindly pass the sugar, please?!"

"Well not _that_ truth obviously." Aziraphale snapped, tugging a white, monogramed handkerchief from out of his pocket and dabbing bullet sized drops of sweat from the back of his neck.

"Then _what_ truth, Aziraphale? Huh?" Crowley looked limp and exhausted. And sad. His mouth was turned down at the corners in that ever so heart breaking way Aziraphale had so rarely borne witness to and could so barely cope with. "What truth am I supposed to be telling them?"

"Well... well that we're..." Aziraphale stopped, stammering over whatever unknown words might have otherwise made their way out of his mouth. He didn't know what he was going to say. He didn't know what truth was _true_. "-that we're... friends."

It was a _lie_. Oh, it was a _terrible_ lie. For they were friends, nothing more could be certain. But to say that they were _simply_ friends? There was nothing _simple_ about whatever it was that they shared. He was whitewashing what they both clearly recognized as being a connection that was vastly and indisputably more intense, more passionate, more significant.

He knew this. Aziraphale knew it all too well. But he couldn't... he simply couldn't abide the classifying of whatever their relationship was as... romantic love. The implications that came with such a thing were altogether too staggering. He wasn't able to process them. The very thought of it evoked a terror in him so profound that he felt it might rankle the borders of his very soul into irreparable pieces.

For he _did_ love Crowley. He loved him with a propensity which extended far beyond the means by which a natural angelic love might be accepted. He loved him in ways he did not know how to express; to convey by some means more tangible, more meaningful than an earthly smile.

But what welled up in Aziraphale, stronger still even than that near all consuming love, were the walls which the Virtues themselves had installed within his angelic soul. A celestial fail safe, one might say. And that fail safe was currently bringing the shutters smartly down and pressing flashing red buttons on every available control panel.

He was compelled, by the strongest and basest angelic instinct; prohibiting all means by which temptation might gain traction within his soul. It was a cruel thing and it held sway over him, much as his addiction to cigarettes had once done.

Aziraphale knew full well, that his deference would have served as much as an insult to Crowley, as his once having referred to their relationship as 'fraternizing' had done. And indeed, the demon responded to the angel's categorization of 'friends' with a disgusted scoff. As though something foul smelling had been placed on the table under his sensitive nose and he was due to be spending some much unwanted time in the company of it.

" _Friends._ " He said, emotionlessly. Looking somehow more exhausted by the minute. Aziraphale for his part, couldn't even bring himself to continue to make eye contact. It was impossible to do or say anything right, when those enormous eyes of Crowley's were all but staring into his soul.

"That's what we are. As I recall _you're_ the one who insisted on it in the first place. I can't see why my affirming it now should be of annoyance to you."

He would not have blamed Crowley for lunging across the room and slapping him for this one. Even to Aziraphale, the purposeful ignorance of the statement was an awful, injurious act. But the demon did nothing quite so dramatic; though the comment had indeed wounded and infuriated him. He kept it all tucked in tight, allowing coldness instead to seep on out.

"No. I guess you can't see it, can you?" He started walking backwards towards the door, twisting his lips into a thin, angry little line. Neither of them could see it, of course, but the yellow of his eyes had swallowed up near every available inch of what had minutes earlier, been white. "Never could."

He slammed his back through the doors, letting in the night air and a handful of small, dried leaves. They fluttered impertinently over the stoop, lighting upon the floor where the demon had only moments earlier been standing. A demon who, without even the offer of his perfunctory lazy wave, marched himself over to where the Bentley was half parked up over the curb, magicked away the clamp which had been affixed to its left wheel and tore off into the night, leaving in his wake, a small, unneeded sweeping job and an angel who found that the task served as a good distraction from ever the more lamentable thoughts he might otherwise have been occupied with.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I remember these chapters well. SO angsty :/ Thanks as always for reading, commenting, giving kudos or bookmarking, you guys are fantastic :) Feel free to flick on over to the next part if you fancy!
> 
> All my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	12. Or, in which everyone can have an existential crisis for absolutely free.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale felt as though something were unwinding inside of him. And he was grasping; grasping so desperately to wind it back in. To have it make sense again. He tried to smile. It was what he did, when his heart was otherwise breaking. "How long do you propose that we... not see each other for?"
> 
> Crowley shrugged, chewing another lump of biscuit in the corner of his dry mouth. "Don't know. A while, at least. I just..." And now he looked at Aziraphale and the angel rather wished he hadn't felt the need. The eyes were heart breaking and painful and beautiful and he wouldn't see them. Not for however long Crowley meant to keep him at arms length. "I need some time away from you."
> 
> Aziraphale smiled kindly. Inside, he was screaming...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: I did not come up with Good Omens, sadly. A shame, for I would be wealthy and popular and very much as content as a fat cat with a full bowl of cream and canary feathers protruding from its mouth.
> 
> A/N: Prithee gentles, might I ask a small favour? Could you, in your role as the reader, kindly partake of the following chapter? It makes everyone on stage feel very the much appreciated :) Now, speak the lines trippingly!
> 
> (Every character in The Three Stages) We are wasting our time up here...
> 
> MadamMortis: No! No, I'm sure that they love all the... talking. :/
> 
> Bit of a headcannon I've got is that when Crowley gets drunk, not only does he get more obviously eccentric and loquacious but that he also gets really, really, really incredibly stupid. I'm talking next level stupid. Like, missing the plainly obvious, forgetting he has powers, pretty much should not be left to his own devices, lip blistering level of stupidity. So stupid that without Aziraphale to prompt him, he would forget to sober himself up and would just remain drunk until he wakes up the next morning with a hangover.
> 
> That being said, this is the last chapter that will cover the original 12th chapter. After this, you guys are going to see a lot of updates come in quick succession, and I apologize in advance! It's the only way to keep each chapter under 10k however, so once again, I thank you for your patience and I'll try and get these all out as quick as I can!
> 
> Thanks as always, and I will see you on the flipside :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**February 8th - 7:25am** _

**_A.Z Fell & Co - London Soho... _ **

Aziraphale had never been good with his mobile phone. It was a new addition to his life and one that he hadn't, as such, learned as of yet to naturally integrate into his well established and much practiced daily routine.

Which was why he was hardly at all surprised to find, when he checked it that following morning, that the phone had at some point run out of power and switched itself off. He might not have checked it at all, if not for the worry he had been nursing concerns Crowley and their terrible argument the night before.

He hadn't called; not the bookshop at least, which had got Aziraphale to wondering as to whether or not he might have tried the mobile phone device instead.

He sighed, lending a hypothetical hand to the back of his own wrist as he rustled about in his desk drawer, searching for the charging cord that Crowley had shown him how to use. He plugged it into one of the walls ancient power points and slipped the delicate little steel tip into the base of the phone. It took a while for enough electricity to run into the device for him to be able to switch it on, but when he was finally able to do so, he had himself quite the shock.

It seems that Crowley _had_ tried to call him during the night. It would seem he had tried to call him a total of _twenty-five times_ , in fact. There were quite a few voice mail messages too, but the fact that Crowley had tried to call him so many times naturally set Aziraphale to panicking. He immediately set the mobile phone down, grabbed up his rotary phone from the desk and dialled Crowley's home number. It went straight through to his answering machine.

"Are you there? Listen, I'm ever so sorry, I didn't go and plug this stupid mobile phone device in and it switched itself off overnight. Please give me a call as soon as you're able. Just to let me know you're all right. Good bye."

As an afterthought, he tried dialling Crowley's mobile phone. Perhaps he was out? Imagine the angel's surprise when he heard a corresponding ringing coming from behind him and turned to see a very ragged, half-dead looking demon, dressed in boxers, singlet and traditionally high riding socks, passed out on the corner settee, in the company of his very favourite green security blanket. The ringing didn't at all aid in rousing the demon, who looked to be so deeply unconscious that he wasn't even snoring. Aziraphale chanced he wasn't likely to be _breathing_ ; which wasn't at all unusual with preternatural beings.

Relieved that the demon hadn't in fact gotten himself abducted by a band of vindictive agents from Hell, Aziraphale hung up the phone and sank back into his chair; rubbing a hand wearily across the lines of his forehead. He picked up his mobile again, clicked over to his message bank and held the tiny, flat device up to his ear. What followed was an increasingly bizarre series of voice mail messages, left by what was quite obviously a very drunk, very emotional Anthony J. Crowley and which told a story that Aziraphale could hardly feel sorry for not having been around to bear witness to:

* * *

**Message 1: (8:45pm)** Oh, hey. So... so, um... the girls confiscated my phone because they said- because I was mad at you I shouldn't be allowed to have my phone while I'm drinking because then I might... drunk dial, or somefink. Anyway, I miracled my phone back and now I guess I'm just... doing just what they said I was going to do! **(Here, there was some soft laughter, then some rattly sniffling sounds)** I don't remember why I called you. I'm still mad at you. You probably don't even know why I'm mad at you. Oh, get this! I sang 'So what' tonight by Pink. You know that one, it goes **(Aziraphale was forced then to endure some extremely drunken, slurring near renditions of what might have comprised some of the lines of the infamous girl power song by the artist known formally as Pink)** I felt very empowered when I was done and I think you should feel sad that I'm not gonna pay your rent anymore. Anyway, I'mma gonna go now. Just ordered another _Vieux Carré_. You would have _loved_ these, FYI. **(Big smug slurping sounds)** Byyyeeee...

 **Message 2: (9:11pm)** Aziraphale! Hey! Just wanted to let you know that I have gotten hit on three times tonight! Two were girls, one was a guy. They weren't very good looking. I don't think. The work girls say that I should... go home with someone else tonight. Teach you a lesson about treating me nicer. I won't be around forever, you know and... and you know what... you could do a lot worse. They say I'm a catch! I'm a catchy demon. But you... you keep on dropping the blessed _ball_ , Aziraphale! You don't catch _anything_! Except for the small pox once, remember when you caught the small pox? You got all those big lumps all over the place. You wouldn't let me squeeze them. You were like ' _No Crowley, I'm probably going to discorporate - boo-bee-boo-boo_!' Big Angel baby. I mean, who hasn't had the small pox in their time? _I_ had the bubonic plague, but you didn't see _me_ making a big whiny deal about it. But anyway, listen, hey, are you listening? Okay, good. Listen... WOULD YOU CLOWNS SHUT THE HEAVEN UP?! I'M TRYING TO TELL ALEX SOMETHING IMPORTANT! **(Sound of a throat being cleared and a clank of what is clearly a shot glass hitting a bar top)** Anyway, you know, I'm not... just so you know, I'm not gonna go home and have the shagging with a human. That would be **(Makes a sound, the closest written approximation of which is 'Bleurk')** yucky. I just wanted you to know that I have got options. Bitch. **(Hangs up with short lived conviction and self assuredness)**

 **Message 3: (9:36pm)** **(The conviction and self-assuredness having most assuredly worn off by this point, the only noises coming from the phone is a series of strangled, pathetic sobbing noises, interspersed with suspiciously meaty sounding hiccups)**

 **Message 4: (9:48pm) (The not often witnessed sound of a demon sobbing like a baby can be plainly heard emanating at a frequency high enough to shatter both expensive crystal and eardrums alike)** Azz-zzi-zira-ph-ph-phale... I'm s-s-sorry I cuh-called you a bitch. You're not a bitch, your hair is s-so fluffy and you are so n-nice and your cologne has a smoky intimation which reminds me of that chair in that gentleman's club, the o-one with the soft leather in the smokers room. We had cigars in there, back in 1921, remember? In other news, I kuh-kinda wish I had my blanket right now because the footpath is so f-f-fucking cold.

 **Message 5: (10:12pm)** Hey, Aziraphale. Did you know that the word 'winebibber' came from the 1520's and it means a person who drinks too much wine? So that means you and me, we're, we're, we're, you know, we're pretty much winebibbers. Wine sluts. Sluts for wine. Been annoying me for months that. Wine... _bibber_. It's still a stupid word. Not as stupid as bouillabaisse though. And not as stupid as you. Still not talking to you, by the way.

 **Message 6: (10:21pm)** Hey, don't know if you tried calling or not. The girls confiscated my phone again. And my keys. Couldn't tell 'em that I can sober up to drive home so, you know... thought they were doing the right thing, hey? Had to leave Bentley out on the street. _The_ Bentley, not Bentley - its name isn't Bentley. I'm not one of those kooks who names their car. If I did, it would be something stylish like Raul Estenberg Tatenhop. Now I'm walking home in the dark. It's really dark out here. I'm not scared at all. I like spooky things. Even spooky things wearing grey shawls, which I'm pretty sure might be following me in a creepy looking hunch backed gait - _get the Heaven away from me you horrible old crone!_ **(The sounds of expensive snake skin boots slapping the tarmac can be distinctly heard, along with what is Crowley clearly on the verge of having an asthma attack).**

 **Message 7 (10:55pm)** : **(Sounds of garbled, especially pathetic sounding sobbing)** Aziraphale, I tripped over and fell into a bush. Then I threw up in the bush. ... and a little bit... on a hedgehog, I think. He's not happy. The hedgehog, I mean... at least I think it's a he. I don't know. I don't really know how to sex a hedgehog. Well not _sex_ a hedgehog you know, that would be weirder and grosser than sexing a human. But figuring out _what sex_ the hedgehog is. Maybe you roll it onto its back or something and stick its quills in the ground so it doesn't run away. Hey, wasn't there a poem about that? The hedgehog can't be buggered at all? How do hedgehogs have sex, ya think? Ya reckon they do it missionary style? Seems terribly romantic of 'em. Anyway, I think you may need to come and pick me up. I'm sorta stuck in this bush, with my legs up in the air. This seems to be an especially molestable position to be caught in. Hopefully no service people come along ... wait, you _can't_ come and pick me up. You don't have a car and even if you stole one, which you _wouldn't_ because you're a _stinking angel_ , you wouldn't know how to drive it. I really need to teach you how to drive. I mean, what if both my arms fall off? You'd need to learn then.

**Message 8: (11:05pm) (Nothing but a piercing emulation of the Cape Rain Frog scream, which Aziraphale simply deletes and moves on to the next message.)**

**Message 9: (11:10pm)** Hey. Just realized that if I can miracle back my phone, why the fuck didn't I just go ahead and do that with my keys? Got the keys, managed to fall out of the bush. Sorry my hedgehog, friend. Do enjoy the rest of your evening. Sorry about the chunks of salsa stuck in-between your quills. I'mma walk back to where I left the Bentley. Gonna drink drive, just cause I know it'd make you super mad. Might even run down some witches cones. Can I hear a wahoo?

 **Message 10: (11:31pm)** Made it home but now I can't get in my door because the girls took my keys. Can you please run my spare keys over for me? Take the bus or something? I'm just going to have a little sleep on the floor while I wait. Don't take too long, it's really cold and dark out here in the hall and I'm scared of ghosts. Did I ever tell you I'm scared of ghosts? I don't even know if they exist or not, but I wouldn't put it past God to pull a swiftie like that.

 **Message 11: (11:47pm)** Forgot, had my keys the whole time. It's how I drove the Bentley, duh. Come to think of it, didn't really _need_ the keys to drive the Bentley in the first place. Could have just used magic. Man, I am _stupid-dumb_ when I'm drunk. Anyway, going to take a shower. Got leaves and vomit on myself and all sorts. Hey, remember that time back in the garden of Eden when you pulled all those twigs out of my hair? That was a very special time. I treasure it. But clearly you don't treasure _me_ because I've left you hundreds of voice mail messages and you haven't got-gotten-got, you know- called back to me! Even when I was out on the street, passed out in a bush in a pile of my own chunder! I could have been _dead_ for all you knew! _I could have been getting raped by a scary hunchback!_ **(Wimpey, very un-demony like desolate sounding sob)** You know, let's just go ahead and say that I _am_ dead. Ha! I'm _dead_. Dead _and_ raped by a hunchback. In that order. How does that make you feel, Aziraphale? I'm dead and you didn't even know, because you don't check your bloody phone! I am NEVER talking to you again, you are the worst friend and an even worse angel! Now you'll have no one to talk to! You'll have to make a puppet out of a sock and a piece of string, tied around your hand. You can talk to your new sock friend when you get lonely; take Sock Crowley out for dinner at the Ritz. You know what, actually _don't_ call your new sock friend Sock Crowley, I don't want you even using my name anymore! Call it Sock Puppet or Engelbart Humpersock for all I care!

 **Message 12: (12:17pm)** Me again. I just realized that maybe the reason you're not answering your phone is because something happened to you. I'm coming over to check.

 **Message 13: (1:13pm)** Standing over you right now and you're asleep. Fast asleep. You look so peaceful when you're sleeping. You also look extra stupid with a big handlebar moustache drawn on your upper lip with permanent marker. Oh, still not talking to you. I'm gonna go sleep on your couch but I'll be outta here before you even get up in the morning, so... don't bother waking me. Ciao.

* * *

Well, Aziraphale didn't quite know whether to bust for laughing at what he had just heard or to simply sit there with his mouth hanging open. He wiped a finger across his upper lip and sure enough it came back with a little streak of black marker across it.

Rather than go and get angry about it, Aziraphale resolved to simply let the marker moustache go (for the demon did have every reason to be angry with him) and instead made his way into the kitchen and set the kettle to boiling. He made a cup of strong coffee with just the lightest dash of milk and one sugar ( _Crowley's standard_ ) and brought it back into the study area along with a couple of dry biscuits on a plate. He knelt by the settee, taking Crowley's crooked glasses off of his face and gently stroking the side of his _(rather white and bloodless looking_ ) cheek.

"Wake up, my dear." He whispered, brushing his thumb in a slightly firmer circle. Crowley's eyes moved from side to side beneath the lids, the eyelashes fluttering. A sliver of yellow appeared and the demon gave a loud, startling gasp as oxygen started flowing once more back into his blood stream. He smacked his tongue around what had to have been a very dry mouth, blinked at Aziraphale with some confusion. Groaned then and sank his head back into the arm of the settee, rubbing at his aching temples.

"I'm guessing... _I_ did that, huh?"

"Oh... right." Aziraphale said, remembering the moustache and waving a hand over his face so as to clear it away. "Never the mind. I gather you were a little cross with me."

"There's no _little_ about it. And no past tense either." He accepted the coffee and the biscuits nonetheless. Took a good old sip and all but shoved an entire Ginger nut into his maw. Coffee and ginger biscuits were his go to combination for dealing with a nasty hangover. The ginger in the biscuits helped to settle his stomach. Aziraphale knew this, of course. They had been getting drunk together a very long time. "I'm still cross with you."

"Can't we talk it out?" Aziraphale asked, finding his legs getting rather sore and wobbly from being crouched by the settee as long as he had. He eased himself up and moved just so as to perch on the edge of the couch but was surprised to see Crowley climb immediately to his feet. Still a little wobbly. But determined, it seemed, not to remain for any longer in the angel's company.

"Actually... I'm thinking I probably... probably shouldn't see you for a while."

This hit Aziraphale with quite as much deafening shock as might a sledgehammer if levelled directly into the side of his head. He thought for a moment that Crowley might have been joking, such was the inherent alarm he felt whence considering the alternative.

"What... what do you mean?"

Crowley, in an act which seemed to be plucked entirely from Aziraphale's own repertoire, kept his eyes directed away from the angel. "I mean, you live _your_ life, I live _my_ life and we just... have some space from each other. That's what you were wanting in the first place, wasn't it? Space? Some 'you' time?"

"Well... yes, I suppose so but I... well, I really only meant an evening or so." Aziraphale felt as though something were unwinding inside of him. And he was grasping; grasping so desperately to wind it back in. To have it make sense again. He tried to smile. It was what he did, when his heart was otherwise breaking. "How long do you propose that we... not see each other for?"

Crowley shrugged, chewing another lump of biscuit in the corner of his dry mouth. "Don't know. A while, at least. I just..." And now he looked at Aziraphale and the angel rather wished he hadn't felt the need. The eyes were heart breaking and painful and beautiful and he wouldn't _see them_. Not for however long Crowley meant to keep him at arms length. "I need some time away from you."

Aziraphale smiled kindly. Inside, he was screaming. An incomparable pain stole through his chest; little different to what he supposed a burning blade might feel if it had been stabbed hard into where his heart was located and dragged across the length of his body. Of course, he let only little of this show.

"If... that's what you want. Take all the time you need. I will be here whenever you're ready." He stood up and went to the laundry. Brought out the freshly laundered work uniform that he had popped into the dryer earlier that morning. Handed both the neatly folded bundle of clothes, the blanket and Crowley's glasses back to him. "Here. I put it through a fluff cycle. It's much softer now. Do be careful with it. You don't want to be out of pocket."

Crowley nodded, taking up his glasses and sliding them on before accepting the bundle of clothes. His hand brushed to Aziraphale's as he did and the angel reflexively lifted his index finger to stroke, quite unconsciously, against the demon's. Crowley pulled back as though he had been burned.

" _Don't_ , Aziraphale." He warned and it was quite enough to push the pain that Aziraphale was feeling on the inside ever so briefly to the surface. Which didn't help Crowley, whose own face wrenched to bear witness to the exposed face of Aziraphale's true inner workings. The angel turned away, pulled his lips in tight to keep whatever noises might have been about to come out, in. With everything he had, he forced up another smile. His eyes were blurry though. He hadn't been swift enough to keep the tears from coming.

"I'm sorry. So sorry. Please. Do take care of yourself."

"Yeah. You too." Crowley's lower jaw jutted off firm to the side, his own means at maintaining some slim control over his emotions. He gulped the last of the coffee and handed both the empty mug and the saucer back to Aziraphale. "Thanks. Um... see you."

Aziraphale gave a little nod, managing to hold onto that soft smile just long enough for Crowley to make his way out the door. No one was watching then, so it was all well and good to let the strain fall out of his face, to let the tears drop down out of his eyes and to let that hideous, hateful smile fall away.

"Goodbye, my dear." He said, kneading his hands together as he lowered himself slowly into his favourite chair. He knew he needed to go and turn the sign over in the doorway. Raise the blinds and let the day and the inevitable spattering of customers in. But he needed a moment. Perhaps a couple of moments first.

And then, he would do just as Crowley had suggested and find a means to somehow go on with living his life.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you as always for joining me, lovely people :) Don't be afraid to concrit, comment in general if that is something which you feel comfortable doing.
> 
> I will work as quickly as I can to finish editing and subdividing the previous content. I apologize again for any annoyance it may cause, but I promise I will do my best to get this all looking as nice and as trim as possible. It will be especially annoying with bookmarks, I know but please, I beg your patience and I will do my best to get the content back out as quick as I can!
> 
> Until next time keep smiling everyone and as usual, with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	13. Or, in which a demon draws a line.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well if it's the truth you want, then that is precisely what I shall give you." He took his hand down off of the bar, turning to face Crowley more completely. Made himself be strides more courageous than he'd ever reason to be in the past. Nothing had felt quite so terrifying as this. Nothing, however, seemed to have ever been more important. Not even the end of the world had caused his hands to start to tremble such as this. They had never trembled. Not in all the time he had existed. His convictions and his assuredness in those convictions had always been incontestable. 
> 
> Now... now, he felt himself truly and unequivocally at great risk and it was with enormous strength of personal will that he pushed past those ageless and demonstrably overpowering instincts to shield himself by any means possible and offered Crowley that which he knew, beyond all doubt, to be the truth...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: You can't just shoot children! (Got no idea what that has to do with a disclaimer, but it seems a fairly valid point we should all observe. Also, I've written what seems like billions of these in a very short space of time, and I'm getting a little bit shot of it, to be honest.) ... That being said; don't own Good Omens. Obviously.
> 
> A/N: I apologise in advance to those of you who received the update for a new chapter, but were not aware of the fact that I am subdividing the pre-existing content. There are in fact, going to be a considerable amount of updates, with the next new original chapter being number 54. Yup.
> 
> In case you weren't aware that this was happening, I will explain quickly: Basically, I wanted to make the content easier to consume for my readers and to get the chapters nice and neat and even. Better formatting, better flow, all around a better reading experience. (I hope!)
> 
> I also feel the need to advise that this is far from an attempt to draw attention to the story. The chapters are simply too long, uneven and messy and I would like to have a much tidier format going into the future.
> 
> Of course, I am very sorry to those of you, who are no doubt going to be spammed with notifications. I apologise, but this is, I feel, in the best interests for the story and much more considerate to you, the readers as well. I beg your patience whilst all this reformatting is going on. I hope to have it done before the end of the year, or at least by early January. I'll be posting progress updates on my bio page, so please check there, if in doubt.
> 
> That being said, please enjoy the 'update' and I will see you on the far side!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~February-April, 2019~** _

**_A.Z Fell & Co - London Soho... _ **

It wasn't like they hadn't fought before.

They were two clever, opinionated individuals, who had, until recent times, stood on opposite ends of the celestial chess board. They'd butted heads more times than Aziraphale could count. They had spent time apart on account of these minor upsets, though never for very long. They got themselves in far too much trouble and with far too much regularity for this ongoing abstinence to ever make much sense.

Time was precious. The time that they shared together was even more precious. And Aziraphale was swiftly learning that time away from Crowley, especially in the days following the Armage-Don't-even-bother ( _as Crowley had taken to calling it)_ was completely and utterly unbearable.

The longest time they had ever spent apart (with the exception of a certain spat in the 1800's which had lingered for a record century of profligate silent treatment) was when Crowley had, for whatever the reason, decided to take a nap in the 1700's, which spanned right on through the first half of the century.

He hadn't been angry with Aziraphale; it was simply that the humans were doing much too good of a job on his behalf and he'd been feeling a little run down. He was quite unsurprised to find that his presence had not in fact been noticed by the legions of the damned _(he had gotten up at least once during his nap to use the lavatory and to flick off some paperwork, stealing credit for a number of things he gleaned from a newspaper he stole off of a neighbours porch_ ) but was ever the more concerned by his not being able to pick up Aziraphale's scent anywhere.

It took quite a bit of digging, but he had of course then managed to track the stupid idiot down to France, just in time to prevent him from having his flock headed noggin lopped clean off of his shoulders.

Aziraphale had of course been ever so grateful for the rescue. Grateful in turn, because he had not actually _seen_ Crowley in some fifty years and had taken to wondering as to whether the demon had been called back to Hell on a more permanent basis. Or if something fouler had in fact occurred. Thoughts that their arrangement may have been unearthed by Crowley's superiors was never far from Aziraphale's mind.

It was dreadful, to worry for someone with such exquisite propensity of feeling. Travelling abroad for crepes seemed a most useful distraction, he had thought, though he had of course deliberately kept those particulars from Crowley later on. The demon hadn't seen fit to leave him a message explaining just where and what he was doing for five decades, so he could simply sit pretty on the rather flimsy explanation of Aziraphale being thrown in the Bastille all for want of a semi-decent lunch.

This time, however, things were different. What served ever so uniquely in representation of this was that when they had bickered in the past, it had been Aziraphale whom had kept his distance. Crowley had always, without fail, been the one to work his way back to the angel's side first. It had been this way for over six thousand years. It was a _consistent_. Something Aziraphale could hold onto; find reassurance in the knowing that sooner, rather than later, Crowley would take that first step back towards reconciliation.

A month passed. And then another.

No word.

Nothing.

Aziraphale truly wanted to keep to his word and give Crowley the space he had requested. Indeed, it seemed to him a very important thing to respect the wishes of others; in particular someone he cared for deeply.

It was, of course, what a good angel would have done.

But then Aziraphale reminded himself that Heaven had tossed him over to the metaphorical scrap yard some months prior, shelved his compunctions with a most certainly un-angel like 'Fuck it' and, post imbibing an entire bottle of 2007 Gaja Barbaresco one evening, bundled the rotary phone into his lap and dialled Crowley's flat.

He was a little tipsy and he hadn't quite expected the demon to pick up, which was why he was so startled by the call actually being answered.

"What?"

Aziraphale near fumbled the phone onto the floor, such was his surprise. And not even the wine was quite enough to sand the edges off of the anxiety he was now suddenly experiencing. "Oh, hello. ...Wasn't quite sure I'd get you, to be honest."

"Gone part time at work. Increased shifts. Sleepovers and the like." He didn't sound any more grumpy than he usually did, which Aziraphale took to be a good sign. Crowley's phone manner had always been decidedly brusque. This was nothing if not the norm. "Speaking of work, I'm just getting ready to head in now. You'll have to make it quick."

"Ah, right. Okay." Aziraphale cleared his throat. Realized, as he did, that he wasn't entirely sure as to why he had called Crowley in the first place. Only that he had _wanted_ to do so. Had _wanted_ to hear his voice. "Well... I just... I was wondering if you... if you'd had enough time away yet."

Crowley didn't speak for a moment. When he had, it was in a voice every bit as firm as Aziraphale had ever heard it. With that oft times depth of maturity the demon was able to whip out of corner pocket on the odd occasion it was required.

"If I had, I would have called you to talk. Clearly I haven't."

Aziraphale stammered, aware that Crowley was likely only mere seconds away from terminating the call. He couldn't let him go just yet. Not yet. "Well, you see, the thing is that... I just... I wanted to tell you that... I'm sorry, Crowley. Please." You might have heard a pin drop, the silence on the other end of the line was so absolute. "I can't stand knowing that you're angry with me. All the more that I... that I hurt you. These last few months without you have been just awful. I can only stand my own company for so long, you know." He lowered his voice, bringing down quite as much of his walls as he possibly could in the process. Spoke deeply, if minimalistically, from the heart. "I miss you terribly."

Crowley was silent on the other end. So silent in fact that Aziraphale feared he might have already hung up on him. He was just about to call it quits himself and surrender the phone back to the cradle, when the demon spoke up at long last:

"Are you sorry that we had a fight? Or are you sorry for _what_ we had a fight about?"

Aziraphale was somewhat confused by this. He might not have been if he hadn't been as intoxicated as he was. The wine, at least in this situation, had not worked well in his favour. "Well I'm... I'm sorry that we had a fight, of course."

"Right. Gotta get going or I'll be running late."

It had clearly been the wrong answer. Aziraphale tried calling out to him, desperate to take another stab at making amends but the demon it seemed, was having none of it. He hung up the phone, leaving Aziraphale at the smug mercy of the cold, dispassionate beeping of the dial tone. It seemed to him, quite suddenly, the very definition of loneliness given form. That erstwhile and dissonant _'beep-beep-beep'_.

He was terribly confused. And terribly cross with himself. And also, in that vein, terribly well shot of having dinner by _himself_ most every night of the week.

Aziraphale was accustomed to eating out alone from time to time; it was how he had gotten friendly with a great deal of the chefs in the restaurants he frequented. And it wasn't as though he was embarrassed by such a thing. But he had grown used to having Crowley's company, especially of late and to gaze over at an empty chair night after night had him take serious considerations into whether he might actually do as a drunken Crowley had suggested and fashion a new friend for himself out of an old sock and a piece of string. It could hardly have been sadder than _this._

Desperate times. Times in which it was ever so difficult in which to rest easy for even but a moment. He felt, ever constant, that terrible, heavy weight of Crowley's unhappiness pressing down upon his shoulders. It mattered to him far more in fact, than Heaven's disapproval ever did. Heaven after all could not look at him with those eyes. Could not offer in turn that which Crowley was so effortlessly able to provide him with. That true, unconditional, incomparable companionship.

Oh, it was like having a limb ripped out. And learning how to function again without it.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

It would seem, however, that it was not just Aziraphale having this onerous time of things. He might have thought himself stranded alone on the veritable island that was his loneliness until one night, not a week following his disastrous drunken phone call, he was making his way back up the road to the bookshop after yet another dinner in his own, ever the more begrudged, company.

It was not a restaurant which he habitually frequented. Those contained far too many memories of Crowley and had become notoriously painful in which to linger these days. As such, he returned to the shop by way of a path he was not accustomed to routinely traveling. He was distracted, as he so often was with his thoughts and almost missed what happened next.

Crowley's Bentley was parked on the side of the road, tucked in just around the corner from the bookshop. The driver's side door was open and Crowley was standing on the exposed lip, arms resting on the cars roof and chin in turn resting upon his hands. He was staring up the road, turning his head ever so often from side to side. Waiting, it seemed, for Aziraphale to appear from any one of the usual directions.

He might have been well hidden, if not for the fact that Aziraphale's path that night had taken him right up behind where the Bentley was parked. He himself didn't speak. He just watched, feeling some warmth leach back into the cavern of his chest, which had felt ever so cold these past, agonizing weeks.

Crowley; keeping an eye on him.

Just as he always done.

Aziraphale was struck by the overwhelming need to go to him then. To pull him into his arms and hold him tight; give every ounce of pressure required to make up for all those hugs that Crowley had to have been missing. Had to have been _needing_. He took a step forward. The slightest breeze blew on past him. Crowley's head snapped to the side. His nostrils twitched.

Suddenly, he was swinging himself down into the car with such speed it might have put a hyperactive orangutan to shame. Aziraphale had barely time to open his mouth before, with a squeal of burning rubber, the Bentley's pedal was pressed direct to the metal and the vintage car shot off down the street, almost taking out everything which might have had the misfortune to be either on the road, on the sidewalk or indeed to have simply existed right then and there in near conjunction to what was a clearly, very the much rattled demon.

"Crowley!" Aziraphale yelled, running out onto the street, watching as the Bentley's rear lights got further away. A lick of pure irritation strobed the edges of his celestial soul. He'd had _quite enough_ by this stage. "Oh..." He did his very best not to swear. Somewhat succeeded. "Sod this."

He snapped his fingers. A moment later, he was installed in his regular perch in the passenger seat of the Bentley. Crowley was glaring out the windshield with such intensity that Aziraphale was quite surprised to find the glass still in one piece and not littered with thousands of tiny hairline cracks.

"Crowley!" He snapped and the demon near jumped out of his human skin, yanking the wheel hard to the right and nearly veering into oncoming traffic.

"Fucking heaven!" He exclaimed, managing, due in no small part to his demonic reflexes, to right the vehicle just in time to prevent a catastrophic and most likely discorporating inducing collision. Satisfied that the car was back in the correct lane and that all their limbs were still in place, Crowley fettered out a deep, slow breath, casting a then foul look in Aziraphale's direction. "Warn a body before you go and do something like that! For... someone's sake!"

"I'm sorry," Aziraphale said, pressing his palm firmly into the roof of the car. Why Crowley couldn't install seat belts was really rather beyond him. Probably figured it would ruin the 'original aesthetic' of the vehicle or some such thing. "I didn't mean to startle you but you were driving away so quickly I couldn't think what else to do."

"Surprised you didn't just miracle a rake down in front of the car." Crowley grumbled, lips twisted to form what was rather an unattractive expression on an otherwise conventionally attractive face. He tilted his head back, conceding, it seemed, temporary defeat. "Well, you got me trapped here now, so. Talk."

"I don't know what to say, Crowley." Aziraphale gazed out the window, at the traffic whipping by. It had been impulsive, to have miracled himself into the car such as he had. Now he was here, he didn't quite know what to do about it. He hadn't planned things out this far in advance. "Every time I try to apologize to you, I only seem to make things worse."

"Because you're being purposefully ignorant." Crowley said bluntly. Aziraphale did not contest it. He knew, full well, that it was true. "You know, and not too far below the surface mind you, precisely what this is all about. But you're pretending not to. And it shits me to tears, Aziraphale."

"Well if it's the truth you want, then that is precisely what I shall give you." He took his hand down off of the bar, turning to face Crowley more completely. Made himself be strides more courageous than he'd ever reason to be in the past. Nothing had felt quite so terrifying as this. Nothing, however, seemed to have ever been more important. Not even the end of the world had caused his hands to start to tremble such as this. They had _never_ trembled. Not in all the time he had existed. His convictions and his assuredness in those convictions had always been incontestable.

Now... now, he felt himself truly and unequivocally at great risk and it was with enormous strength of personal will that he pushed past those ageless and demonstrably overpowering instincts to shield himself by any means possible and offered Crowley that which he knew, beyond all doubt, to be the truth.

"The truth is... the truth is that I miss you _dreadfully_ , Crowley. You are so very dear to me. And I don't think it fair of you to punish me for something that I am clearly having difficulties with approaching." He raised a hand, because Crowley had gone, as usual, to open his mouth and sling something back his way. "And before you go and say anything, I would think that it is quite obvious from the way that you were watching the shop that you miss me as well."

"Of _course_ I miss you." The demon said, ever so matter-of-factly. He kept his eyes pinned forwards the whole while, but Aziraphale did not doubt for a second that if there were having this conversation anywhere else but the car, they would be locked on his with just as much tribute as they always did. "If I didn't care about you, this wouldn't be such a bloody issue now, would it?"

"Then why are we even fighting? Why can't things just go back to the way they were?"

Crowley pulled the car over. He had to cross two additional lanes of traffic to do so, and a number of motorists certainly weren't pleased with him for it. He could care less.

He knocked the hand brake on. Switched off the engine. Left the lights on. Why he took note of all these things, he wasn't sure. But he did. They were little things. Little things were reassuring. It was the big things which were more difficult to muddle out.

How could he say this? _Should_ he say it? What can of infernal worms would he be opening if he _did_ say it?

He said it. "Because I don't _want_ things to go back to the way they were."

"Then what _do_ you want?" Aziraphale asked, frustrated, leaning closer so as to try and make some semblance of eye contact. The smell of his cologne, the feeling of his warmth pressing in close to the boundaries of his own body broke through something that Crowley had been holding ever so tightly to these past few months. He had missed the warmth just as dreadfully it seemed, as Aziraphale had missed his conversation.

_His first day of work. The touch of his lips to his cheek._

Crowley turned, wrenching his hands off of the steering wheel. Tugged his glasses free from his face and tossing them somewhere underneath the dash, he wasn't sure where. He wasn't sure of anything, not really. His breathing was all over the place. His human heart had taken to pounding in his chest with such ferocity that it resonated into his ears. He hesitated a moment and then pressed his palm to Aziraphale's cheek; the smooth, warm curve of his cheek. He felt that warmness flood through him. Encapsulate him.

Oppress him.

Crowley's eyes held not a hint of the white they so often did. The strength of his passions would not allow for it. The effect was startling, almost hypnotic. It was quite enough to keep Aziraphale sufficiently distracted, such that he was barely aware of Crowley bridging the gap what remained between them; taking the angel's lips between his own and kissing him deeply.

Crowley had never kissed before. He was incredibly nervous and emotions were, as was to be expected, running high. To wit, it was something of an awkward kiss. He missed a good portion of Aziraphale's lips the first time and had to angle his head so as to accommodate them the second go around. Aziraphale wasn't really giving him much to go on, either. The angel was in something of a state of shock and still attempting to come to terms with what exactly was happening.

It wasn't as though he was particularly blindsided by the act. He'd had an idea going in that this was something along the lines of what Crowley had wanted. This very... human demonstration, one had to say. And they had indeed lived as humans predominantly for over six thousand years now. Was it really so bizarre that some of these practices, some of these desires might in fact have rubbed off on them? It seemed stranger in fact for them _not_ to have done.

They clearly had on Crowley. Aziraphale, for his part, did not quite know how to react. The feeling was not bad. Far from it. It was simply that... well, he didn't really know _how_ he was supposed to respond. He didn't even know what he _thought_. He did however keep his lips firmly shut, because he knew that humans sometimes kissed with their tongues and if Crowley were to attempt to do so with him, he wasn't at all sure how he might react. What might happen next.

 _Don't pull away. You mustn't be selfish. He_ needs _this._

 _And you... you need to be close to him, again. You miss him. Let him do whatever he needs to do to be happy again._ _Give him what he needs._

 _Take what_ you _need._

He wasn't sure when it had happened, but at some point, he had allowed his own hand to press to the side of Crowley's face. He traced his fingers over the high rise of his cheekbones. Something stirred then at an even deeper level. An Urge. Aziraphale chanced a parting of his lips and Crowley's slid perfectly into that now available space. The Urge grew stronger. More demanding. The walls inside of him seemed almost paper thin now and laughably simple to tear away. He wanted... _needed_ to be closer. Closer.

He felt the glance of the demon's tongue. Tentative. Tasting. _Wanting._

_Yes. Closer._

Crowley pulled away suddenly, their lips making much the same sound, it should be said, as a plug itself makes when being uncorked from a drain. He took his hand from Aziraphale's rapidly reddening face, turned back towards the windshield and took hold once more of the steering wheel. His eyebrows had pinned themselves down tight over his eyes and he looked all the more demony than Aziraphale had ever before seen him. His shoulders rose and fell in alignment with the heavy breaths that his body didn't actually require but was making good use of all the same.

"Get out, angel."

"Crowley, I-"

"You got wax in your ears?" Crowley hissed, not even chancing but a glance towards the passenger seat. He had such a tight hold of the steering wheel, that his fingers were creating new indentations in the hand stitched leather. "I said _get out_."

Hurt, chin shining with saliva and feeling ever the more confused than he had been prior to his stowing away in the Bentley, Aziraphale did as he was bade and clambered out onto the sidewalk. He barely had time to close the door behind him before the Bentley screamed away from the curb, hurtling the corner in a wide, tire wrecking arc which just about took out every car in the far lane. A police paddy wagon, siren screaming its high pitched peal of disapproval, hung a sharp U-turn and went speeding off in what was doomed to be a spectacularly failed vehicular intervention.

Aziraphale watched the lights of the Bentley fade into the distance, the police car in hot pursuit and pressed his lips together tightly. So desperately overcome with emotion that, for once, there was naught he could do in his power to contain it.

He felt a great deal of uncertainty. Of fear. Fear for his celestial spirit. Regret. Grief. And even so intrinsically, hovering much closer to the surface than he had ever imagined might have been possible for one such as him; desire.

Standing in the street, suspended still in the foul smelling fog emitted by the Bentley's burning tires, Aziraphale acknowledged a truth of which he still found so utterly and irrepressibly impossible to admit.

The knowing that in that very split second prior to Crowley pulling away, that he had felt the very last of his reservations come crashing down. Had felt the overwhelming Urge to not only accommodate the kiss, but to return it. To deepen it. To part his lips and _permit_ for it to be deepened.

 _Anything_ more might have happened, in fact. And the knowing that such a thing had passed between them and that he, an angel, had enjoyed this entirely human, entirely physical act shared with a demon, was more terrifying than anything he had ever before experienced.

His hands would not stop shaking.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Naww this silly pair of sweet beans. Honestly. Anyhow, I think I've done quite enough writing for now, so I'll just say thankyou as always for joining me on this little journey and feel free to express your thoughts, opinions and or feelings on the piece if you so choose. 
> 
> Join me, if you like, in the next chapter/s, where Aziraphale takes some more decisive action in remedying the rift that has formed between himself and Crowley and the powers of Heaven and Hell look deeper into the particulars of the Contingency plan and stir up ever the more disturbing revelations. Until then and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	14. Or, in which we learn the cost of questions.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He was a light in an otherwise all saturating darkness. And the Angel What Came to Be Known as Crowley had no where else upon which to turn. He wrenched himself from Michael's grasp, losing hair in the process of doing so and crawled on his belly upon the floor, dropping his face to rest upon the feet of the angel Aziraphale.
> 
> "Please. Please, help me. I only asked questions. I didn't even fight in this stupid war, I had no idea things would turn out like this. Please, I beg you... I'm afraid..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens and its lovely characters are not all belong to me. This is fanfiction. It should not be hard to tell. It is not published, sitting on a shelf, earning me dowry. Which is a good thing, because I would likely be sued for ten times the amount of dowry earned for appropriating property that is not my own. … Not that it would be a lot of dowry, at all.
> 
> A/N: Your Good Omens... well, not so much factoid as observation. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to say 'Good Omens-ervations?' Anyway, I know there is a favourite fan theory concerning who Crowley was in Heaven; being by popular interpretation as the Archangel Raphael. Owing to Raphael forming the galaxies and the stars and the like. Crowley does indeed pay tribute to the universe on a number of occasions but my interpretation is that he was never a particularly important angel. For one, I imagine that Aziraphale would have known who he was before he had fallen (perhaps not. Although I should think you would notice someone as important as Raphael going missing). For another, Crowley mentions that he 'helped' to build Alpha Centauri, rather than being directly responsible for creating it.
> 
> In addition, he's not a very important demon in Hell. He's assigned to earth and the book specifies that he's not even a counsellor within the hierarchy of Hell itself. Compare this then to the likes of Dukes Hastur and Ligur and Lord Beelzebub. I kind of get the impression that if Crowley had been important in Heaven, he would more likely be important in Hell, or at least accorded some respect as to his prior status. Again, these are all highly debateable things and I certainly do not denounce anyone else's interpretation of Crowley's original heritage. My belief, however, was that he was likely someone who would have worked alongside Raphael as an architect. Part of a larger team. A particularly skilled one but no one of any great importance, really. I guess it's a personal thing but I just really kind of loathe that whole 'Oh, the twist is that he was once one of the most beloved and revered angels in all of Heaven!' It seems more... charming, I think, for him to have been just one of the angels going about the daily grind. Not a nobody, but not a somebody either. Just there. It makes his establishing identity as the demon Crowley and thusly becoming someone in respect to his relationship with Aziraphale more poignant, I think.
> 
> Another thing that I sort of head cannon is that Aziraphale is in fact a very skilled combatant. As in, especially skilled. It is an area in which he is well trained and knowledgeable, though this does not entail that he in fact enjoys combat or revels in it. Quite the opposite. He once viewed being highly trained in combat as being a ways so as to actually 'prevent' harm coming to others, because it prohibited accidental harm which might come about through not having marshalled your skills enough or by flailing a weapon indiscriminately. 
> 
> Because of his innate loving care for others, I feel this is something Aziraphale would have felt very strongly about. He would WANT to try to subdue others or defer conflict, where possible. And I imagine that this is part of the reasons as to why so many of the other angels are perpetually frustrated with him. Because he toddled off to earth, got chunky and refuses to utilize his skill set in a way they feel appropriate. They view him as having deteriorated to a point that he will no longer fight back. That is, until Crowley posed as him in Heaven and instilled a little doubt into their minds.
> 
> Anyway that little rant over, behold the next chapter, my dears! I hope that you enjoy and I shall see you all at the end of the piece for a few closing thoughts! xxx ooo

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Heaven~** _

_**The Rebellion** _

_**Three hundred years prior to Earth...** _

In the very farthest reaches of the very most disparate borders of the realm known as Hell, there lies a room.

A room which has, and which shall always remain, under lock without key.

No repairs are conducted within this room. The piping might see fit to leak ever so merrily away, if not for their having corroded beyond the point of all repair several dozen eons earlier.

Located wherein the roof of any other more well adjusted and sensible room might be, there exists instead a churning vortex. It might be flame, for it appears as nothing more nor less. A little more to the side of yellow than what might be considered normal, with a black pit settled at the centre like the exposed stone of an avocado. But hell fire is of course of no concern to the demons what reside in the more routinely travelled halls of the Nether Realm. Hell fire might reduce an angel down to so much glittering ash, but it is little more than a light tickle to their Hellish counterparts. There was no reason to lock it away.

It is in fact the transformative sulphur what resides within this churning wagon wheel of horrors. The oft much sung about, quoted, misquoted and humorously referred to whence having partaken of a particularly spicy curry the previous night, Ring of Fire. That old chestnut.

They had all passed through it. The demons. Before they had been demons, of course. The point of the whole blessed thing, was it not? Hardly likely that a firm kick in the tush would amount to much more than a bruise on the buttock. Something more was required for the Celestial army to make its ever so indecorous point. Something far more lasting than a black and blue bruise. Something which seared unequivocally... deeper.

To say that the demons had 'passed through' was hardly in the spirit of the thing, as well. Much too kindly an interpretation. _Thrown_ would be more appropriate. Hurled. Flung. In some cases, kicked and shoved. It was hardly as poetic as the old verses made it out to be. The angels turfed them in with just about as much gentility as a crowd of hungover wedding guests demonstrates when lining up for the following mornings buffet breakfast. Particularly over the bacon and hash brown trays. Several perfectly good fingers had been lost to far better causes, that way.

Sulphur was likened to fire in but in one aspect only. It burned. Seems a silly and rather obvious comparison to draw, does it not? The unique difference what sets them apart however, is that it is not the body which the sulphur attacks, but the eternal spirit. Something far the more vulnerable, far the less protected. Far the more subjectable.

Preternatural Sulphur was _not_ destructive, such as fire. But _transformative_. There in lies the very nature of its incomparable cruelty.

Sulphur could corrode the essence of the eternal spirit. Warp the very countenance of what it was what made you _You_ and twist it into something OTHER. Something significantly altered, more mutilated, more... _not_ you.

What Became the Demons of Hell fancied that there was no pain of which any other being in all the other realms of all the known and unknown worlds could have ever experienced what might compare to having been plunged through the Ring of Fire. It was an undoing. A defamation. A disassembling of most everything they had known and understood to be the finite essence of their ephemeral nature.

They remembered it, oh yes. Far too well. They felt it still; like a stomach ulcer not quite knitted over. They kept the room locked. Kept themselves far away from the sickness what continued to threaten and permeate from behind those cavernous steel doors.

God's constant little reminder for their so called transgression. An ever scratching fingernail to the backs of their moulded necks.

The Angel What Came to Be Known as Lord Beelzebub remembered. It was an agony what might be considered beyond compare if not for the pain which shortly therefore preceded it; the pain of knowing just who it was responsible for having drowned them beneath the waves of this sulphuric nightmare in the first instance.

They had been created in near direct conjunction to one another. At almost the very same moment. They had been the first in fact to have met with Gabriel and Gabriel was the first to have met with them. It was very tentative, those early most days in Heaven. Everyone was a little anxious; a little fresh, a little uncertain. They had supported one another through that; those of the First Flock. Had come, as such, to know one another in ways of which so few of their kind could ever attest to.

Both they and Gabriel had been the very first in all of known history, in fact, to have transcended the nature of their divine love; to encapsulate something... more. Something the deeper, the more personal, the more... specific. They walked to one another's immediate side, spoke words of which wove a language that was ever so uniquely theirs and theirs alone. Two sides of the same coin.

Eternal companions.

Gabriel had not foreseen the questions.

The doubt.

It had made the betrayal all the more personal. For his _not_ knowing. For Them not to have shared what was clearly so bound innately about their soul; progressing step by step and further into the deepest breaches of self-destruction, of unholy disobedience and contempt.

Gabriel was, much as he had always been, one with little capacity to empathize in ways in which he had not otherwise been instructed to do. There were rules and expectations and stipulations in place, so as to help guide Heaven forward in a means by which there was as little as confusion to be gleaned from the process as was reasonably possible. It was not a difficult ask, simply to follow the rules and to live in joyous harmony for all eternity, was it not?

Why then, had they insisted on driving a heel into all of that?

Why had they destroyed it?

Why had they betrayed _him_?

These were the only questions he dared ask. In unconscious streams of which never flowed anyway to within the realm of conscious directive. He did not voice them. The Virtues had created a Blueprint ever so perfectly succinct to that which God had requested that she so desired of her angels and there was perhaps no better example than Gabriel himself.

The love he felt for the Angel What Would Become Beelzebub, was incontestably secondary to that which he retained for the Almighty.

The Lord bade. And Gabriel obeyed.

And hurled his once truest companion into the sulphur without a seconds hesitation.

Given the enormity of his actions, he was himself at a loss as to why the angel Aziraphale had in fact hesitated; had demonstrated such indecent mercy towards the pathetic creature which Michael then wrestled into the room, having reefed their trembling body from beneath the table under which they had been hiding.

"I would have expected more from a Cherubim." Gabriel remarked, face carefully neutral as another angel stepped in to assist Michael with their squirrely captive. The Angel Who Would Come to Be Known as Crowley, was unrecognizable as the demon he was destined to become. He did however, look terrified. His bare feet squeaked upon the porcelain floor as he was herded into the room.

"Please! Please, I didn't _know_! I didn't know it would come to this! _Please_!"

Michael attempted to fairly much toss the flailing cherubim over one shoulder but the angel responded in turn by going completely limp; as though all the bones had vanished from their celestial body. He dropped to the floor, much like an agitated toddler; resistant to all attempts to lift him. Michael took a fistful of softly curled brown hair, wrapping their fingers in good and tight so that the roots pulled painfully as they tugged upward.

"Get up, you bastard. Take some responsibility for what you've done."

"Really... It's all a bit much, isn't it? You needn't drag him." The angel known as Aziraphale spoke at last. His was the kindest voice in the room, though the Cherubim knew full well that his was the hand most responsible for having rounded up the majority of the rebels. Though he had not struck down a life during the war and was a creature known for his predominantly gentle and non-violent nature, his was revered as a sword arm quite every bit as affluent as was Archangel Michael's. He was humble however, having little need for asserting his capabilities. Most recognized that he was very much capable of cleaving a many a head from an otherwise wanting neck, if the mood so took him.

He was a light in an otherwise all saturating darkness. And the Angel What Came to Be Known as Crowley had no where else upon which to turn. He wrenched himself from Michael's grasp, losing hair in the process of doing so and crawled on his belly upon the floor, dropping his face to rest upon the feet of the angel Aziraphale.

"Please. Please, help me. I only asked questions. I didn't even fight in this stupid war, I had no idea things would turn out like this. Please, I beg you... _I'm afraid..._ "

"Don't despair, my dear. Dry your eyes." Aziraphale knelt, gently guiding the weeping Cherubim onto his knees. He used the hem of his robe to dab the tears from his fellow angel's face, guiding his wings about him so as to create a safe pocket in which he might rest a moment. Free from the condemning gaze of those others gathered within the room. "Place your hands together now. Come."

"Aziraphale, you are wasting everyone's time with this nonsense." Gabriel had little in the means of patience, celestial or not. He had thrown the person he cared for most into the newly formed realm known as Hell at the Lord's behest. Why should this grizzling waste of ephemeral space be worth any more of a moments consideration than that of his once dearest companion? "Toss the snivelling creature in and let us be done with it."

"Please. Can't you see that the poor thing is terrified? If he must go, then at least grant him the courtesy of going forward with some semblance of peace. I hardly see the offering of such grace as a 'waste of time'." These were of the days when Aziraphale was of much higher renown and far the more outspoken for what his status at the time entailed. They indulged him, for his combative skills were good. Even if his mindset was all the more charitable than most any of them could reasonably fathom.

Aziraphale took the trembling hands of the weeping Cherubim between his own and helped with folding their fingers together. He smiled reassuringly, pressing his forehead to that of his, for now, fellow angel. Tried to instil some of that warmth of God's light, that hope, within the aura of the poor sad creature kneeling before him.

"Pray. If you are sincere, if you are truly repentant, then She will forgive you."

"I didn't do anything _wrong._ " The Angel to be Known as Crowley said.

"I'm afraid you rather did, my dear. You betrayed your duties. But God is merciful. She will absolve you, if only you are contrite. If only you are genuinely remorseful for your unfortunate transgression." He clutched his own hands tighter to those of the frightened angels. "I will pray with you. Come. _Pray._ Ask Her forgiveness."

The cherubim sobbed, pressing the side of their tear stained face against the Principalities hands. What use was prayer now? They had transgressed beyond the point of all return; offended that which was incontestably understood _never_ to be offended. The writing was on the wall. There would be no absolution. Nothing but that long, slow dive into the fire and the darkness.

A stain like deepest tar which might never be scrubbed from the soul.

Deeper. Beyond reach of all light. A brand.

"I'm sorry." He wept, not believing in fact that he had done anything wrong. He never perceived having asked a question or two as having perpetuated any sin worthy of eternal damnation. The apology was pointless, so far as the Almighty was concerned. But it was not Her to whom he offered his apologies; but to the Principality, who knelt upon the cold and the hard of that floor with that unflinching face of love and support and compassion. Who was attempting, ever so thoughtfully, to help ease him towards an absolution they both most assuredly understood was not at all on offer in the first place. "I'm so sorry. Please, forgive me. _Please_."

The Lord's answering silence was absolute and ever the more instructional, so far as the surrounding angels were concerned. They had since grown weary of this unfashionable display and it was Uriel now who stepped forward, yanking the cherubim out from beneath the safe awning of Aziraphale's wings. The Angel To Be Known as Crowley tried to keep a hold of the principalities hands and felt for a bare, desperate moment, that reciprocal pressure.

"Please." He begged, his eyes staring deep into those of his fellow angel. The fingers loosened slightly. A flicker of what might be uncertainty passed across Aziraphale's pleasant face.

"He seems remorseful, though. Truly." He said, glancing about at the other angels so as to ascertain their assessment of the situation. The looks returned were not those associated with being unconvinced, but those of persons who were plaintively unconcerned as to what the truth might very well have been in the first place.

"Of course he's sorry. He got caught. Let him go. _Now_."

Aziraphale hesitated a moment longer and then smiled so softly, so kindly and loosened the grip of his fingers. They slipped from about the cherubim's, like a hook pulled from the lip of a fish. With it went the final granule of hope that the Angel to Be Known as Crowley had been nursing.

"Oh God. Oh God, no. _Please!_!" He wailed, having descended now to a rather ungainly flailing of limbs which was demonstrably and embarrassingly un-angelic. "Please don't let them do this! This is wrong! You _know_ it's wrong!"

"So sorry." Aziraphale said, his smile set as firmly upon the canvas of his face as had been Gabriel's stone hard dissonance mere minutes earlier. The corner of his lips quavered slightly; that ever so telling expression one might barely maintain when presented with a situation they felt to be utterly contestable. "May we meet on a... better occasion."

"You're damning us! _Cowards!_ The lot of you!"

"This coming from the likes of one who crawls on his belly upon the floor." Gabriel sniffed, taking the angel Which Might Soon Come to Be Known in fact as _Crawley_ by the collar of his robe. The malice drifted up from far below; that terrible feeling of impending doom, of something being terribly wrong. It curdled the stomach, strobed the corners of the mind, such as a beseeching madness seeking claim to that which might otherwise practice sanity. The cherubim felt a fear he has known only the very few moments since that fateful day well up inside of him.

In the bowels of the Vices newly installed Hell portal, the Ring of Fire swirled the transformative sulphur about like a monstrous wagon wheel. It was light years away and yet, close enough to feel. Close enough to send the base of his feet to tingling, his heart to pounding with such ferocity it near sheared the cavern walls of his chest.

"Now shut your stupid mouth and burn already." Said the Archangel and tossed the cherubim down, following directly in the wake of that which he had cared for most assuredly more than anything, sans God Herself. Aziraphale had looked away at the very last moment. The room had taken on a particularly haunting smell; like so much burned meat left unattended on a charcoal BBQ.

* * *

Crowley had in fact come to crawl on his belly. Just as Gabriel had said.

That was what the sulphur did, you see. It _changed_ you.

Changed you quite as much as what you understood _yourself_ to be changed.

Aziraphale could never seem to quite understand that.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As always, thank you for joining me for this here chapter, my dears! If you feel so inclined, the offering of a kudos, a comment or a bookmark is always the very much appreciated by yours truly.
> 
> More updates to come shortly. I'll try to hustle as quickly as I can, just got a lot of family and personal stuff going on at the moment. Honestly, Christmas doesn't even factor into it. But thanks as always for your support, my lovelies and I promise to get more content out to you soon!
> 
> All my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	15. Or, in which in which the storm clouds gather together.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had been two months, eight days since Crowley had asked for some time. For some space.
> 
> There had been nothing in the means of space between them that scant week earlier, when Aziraphale had miracled himself into the passenger seat of Crowley's Bentley and gotten his lips vigorously kissed for his efforts.
> 
> The kiss.
> 
> Oh dear Lord. That kiss...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: All the wondrous characters, foibles and happenstances of Good Omens do not belong to me. I have but the privilege of being able to borrow them a short while.
> 
> A/N: Thank you as always to everyone who is reading, kudo-ing, commenting and bookmarking. You guys are absolutely wonderful.
> 
> Your random Good Omens-ervation of the day: Sometimes I wonder if the real reason Crowley struggled with saying the word 'boullibouise' was to trick Aziraphale into making kissy faces at him. If you think about it like that, the whole context of the scene changes. For the better really ;)
> 
> Hope that you enjoy the 'update', my dears!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Sunday, April 7th, 2019~** _

**_The Grange Estate Nursing Home_ **   
_**Nine months or so until the Apex...** _

"You seem sad, Anthony, dear."

Crowley quietly cursed himself. He'd let his thoughts carry him away again. Work was supposed to have made this all easier; not giving him an excess of time in which to stint on things what might otherwise have occupied his busy mind.

Not the past.

Certainly not Aziraphale.

He had never blamed Aziraphale for his... not quite part in the act of his damnation. He was as much a victim of the circumstances as had been the rest of them. Crowley had no expectations of the angel having ever needed to do something outlandish and courageous. It would likely have seen him just tossed right on into the Ring of Fire himself and what a perfectly wonderful waste of an angel _that_ would have been.

They hadn't known one another then. Not truly. But Crowley had cherished the other angel's kindness and had obviously never forgotten it; had sought in some minor means to repay it all those many years. But he had not been expecting grandiose gestures on behalf of someone with whom he had had the most menial of personal contact back in the days of Heaven.

They knew one another now.

 _That_ was the difference.

"I'm a little sad. Nothing for you to worry about."

"I'll worry if I want." Gretchen said. She puffed out smoke. They were out in the garden once again, sharing a sneaky cigarette. They were going to play canasta later, but nicotine imbuement always had to come first. "Got nothing else to worry my head over, so I might as well fuss over you."

"I'm a staff member. You're not allowed to fuss over me. _Boundaries_." Crowley blew out his own puff of smoke. He had been smoking quite a bit more lately; even when he hadn't been at work. He'd taken to doing so on the patio of his flat. He felt bad still. Even though he and Aziraphale were spending time apart, it still struck him as being demonstrably disrespectful somehow.

But it helped a little. It helped with the stress.

He was quite a bit more stressed than usual these days.

Wasn't getting nearly enough hugs, for one.

"You and your Alex still not talking, pet?"

"Still not talking."

"Life's short-"

"- I know."

"- shouldn't ever let the sun set on an argument, that's what Alfred and I always used to say. Sort out your shit before you sleep."

"Classy as ever, Gretch." Crowley flicked ash out somehow indiscriminately into the pine bark framing the surrounding rose bushes. Bushes that were in such vibrant bloom you might never have suspected that their roots were currently trembling with enough force to incite a tremor in a small subset of islands just off of the Greater Antilles. Not that you would ordinarily suspect such a thing, though you might get to wondering just what magic it was that the gardener might have weaved so as to encourage the plants to profligate so vivaciously. Some special blend of fertilizer, perhaps. "This is just a little... just a little too complicated."

"No such thing. You're just stubborn."

"Not stubborn." Crowley said. Sucked back so hard from his cigarette that the smoke became lodged in the lump that had formed in his throat. His glasses were just as good as the fact that Gretchen was blind where such moments were concerned. He could hide the pinprick of tears, the shine of his eyes. The pain tucked into every damn near line of his ageless face. "Just too fast."

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**Café Phillies, Kensington High Street...** _

She had been known from the very earliest of times as Luxuria. Most modern humans however know her by another name:

Lust.

A Capital Vice. More colloquially known as one of the Seven Deadly Sins.

She'd kept busy in her retirement; atypically enough. The passions of humankind never slept. Not when there were so many willing bodies with which to sleep.

And lust was a busy lady.

Humans lusted voraciously and for quite a bit more than just the flesh. They lusted for most anything of which they wished to obtain. Power, money, popularity, respect, property... It was a drive as variant as it was universally intoxicating. And one which had never dimmed, not so much as a jot in all the thousands of years she had resided upon the earth; underpinning the undercurrents of transgressive human nature.

Most any creature under God's fair creation was subject to desire. None was exempt. And so her work would never be done. Not truly.

Her work took her many places. Corporate businesses. Real estate. Drug dens. Love dens. The highest rises of the highest buildings, to the lowest conflagrate of the shallowest underbelly in the seedier aspects of inner city dwellings. She had overseen the filming of any thousand of pornographic films; some of which had been directly responsible for Crowley's long standing fear of being seduced by provocative service people. She had also been responsible for corporate takeovers, for student teacher affairs, for any far reaching number of extroverted and sometimes deeply disturbing perversions of which the mind might have sort to indulge so as to scratch some particular itch.

Such things never sat at all well with Castitas. Theirs was a drive which had substantially diminished in comparison to the explosion that had been Luxuria's over the passing of the years. So few individuals truly wished to abstain from those things which wrought them pleasure, it would seem. The twenty first century had proved particularly challenging.

Castitas, or Chastity as she might better be known, might have been Luxuria's sister. They were both of dark skin, dark hair and brown eyes. Where Luxuria's body was curvier, more buxom, more... Falstaffian, Castitas was smaller, toned and trimmed. She often went about her business in designer brand exercise gear and in that not so ironic fashion most women adhere to now in a sad handed reference to 'athleisure wear'. Where Luxuria's hair was big, tall and unapologetically permed, Castitas's hair was sleek and straight and often slicked back into a high ponytail. Their eyes, though similar in colour, sparkled differently. Luxuria's vampish and knowing. Castitas's bright and wide and all too vaguely 'morning-person-ish'.

They met at the café with much the same hug they had always greeted one another with. Counter parts, of course, were never immune to the intrinsic pull they felt whence their other half was concerned. That feeling of undiluted love, of duty, of balance, was always ever so much present.

They were joined by Temperantia and Gula; Temperance and Gluttony, respectively. Gula was every bit a terrible American stereotype; represented in form as a large bellied man in a plaid shirt, khaki pants and a cowboy hat. If there had been a chicken bone on which to suck, he would most certainly have been gnawing his slightly crooked front teeth down into the bare marrow of it. Cafe's were typically scant of such offerings however and so he made do with a spattering of assorted pastries; each more rich and decadent and injected thickly with custard than the last.

Temperantia could be most readily described in but one word and safely set to rest as this being substantial enough: Grey. She wore a grey suit, charcoal grey shoes and had tightly pinned back hair that was streaked with strands of silver, which aspired to be grey when they had tired of voraciously beaming their worth to the world. She bore a look of placated, eternal patience and emitted ever so soft, tittering sighs at Gula as he wolfed down an indecent and inordinate amount of food; demonstrably less than the cup of lavender tea from which she had taken only two menial sips, thus far.

It had been two months since they had sat down with the representatives of Heaven and Hell and signed their contracts. Two months, quintessentially, in which they were intended to be conducting some work. But still, they waited.

They waited on the others. Spread far and thin, as they so often were. They would be difficult to find, for it was not their habitual scheduled meeting up time.

And some were spread much further apart than others.

"Have you heard word from the rest?" Luxuria asked, scooping a small spoonful of whipped cream from the decadent curl which rested atop her drink. Gula eyed it obstinately, considered perhaps helping himself and deciding, quite wisely, that appropriating from Lust was never likely to end well. Lust had immeasurable passion and such passion could be ever so easily integrated into the likes of rampant and ever the more indulgent violence.

"Humanitas messaged earlier. His contract arrived the day before yesterday, only just signed it. Should be touching down this morning." Castitas smiled, slapping her fingers ever so lightly to the backs of Luxuria's hand, who was doing her utmost to be seductive with the blob of cream which had purposefully affixed itself to the tip of her nose. "Off again in the jungle somewhere. Aid work, you know. Invidia can't be far behind."

"We can only hope!" The four gathered members of the Contingency plan sat up straight in their seats and smiled, to see none other than the bubbly, moustached and joyous Humanitas alight to the side of their table. He kissed each upon the cheek, for this was nothing if not Kindness given form and made the effort then of crossing to the far side of the room, so as to fetch for himself a chair that was not going to have inconvenienced anyone by his appropriating it. "Been an age and a half! I do so miss that darling creature. And you know they would be ever so worried as to what I have been getting up to. Dear thing."

"That's Envy for you." Temperantia took the ever so slightest touch of a taste from her cup before setting it back down into the saucer whence it came. Not so much as a stray drop had tarnished its surface. "What do you make of all this then? Quite honestly, we're all a little flummoxed."

"I'll tell you what's flummoxing. The way that our powers are exuding." Luxuria stated, stretching out some of the kinks in her back and resulting in a number of humans sitting nearby going home to conduct some very indecent dealings with one another after they had finished their vanilla slice. "Every since we signed those contracts, our preternatural pheromones have just been expunging like crazy. I could control it before; send out small bursts where wanted but _this_! I feel like I'm walking around with the most terrible hormonal body odour ever concocted! A couple started to actually take their clothes off in the park when I crossed through the other morning! Police were called, I think. Saw the blue lights. I might have felt rather the embarrassed if I wasn't... well, me."

"The Apocalypse." Castitas remarked, directing some of her own energy towards the hormonal couples in the hopes that it might drain out some of that unintentional spill over that her counterpart had imparted. "The Anti-Christ denounced their responsibilities and negated the ending of the world. The Four Horseman failed. And so we have been charged with picking up the pieces."

"Did they really suppose that the shadows of the human condition were truly substantial enough to see it through? The culmination of it all?" Gula grunted, spooning in another forkful of food. A great deal of it had taken refuge in the borders of his moustache, twitching out of range of his tongue with the propensity of a threatened weasel. "Never send a horseman to do the job of fighter pilot, that's what I say."

"It was understood that humanity would, through force of free will, instigate the means by which it would ultimately destroy itself, dear Gula." Humanitas said, waiting until the serving lady had noticed his arrival and approaching before making an order for himself. Never one to inconvenience others. "One supposes they were hardly in need of an Anti-Christ really. They're ever so clever at destroying themselves. What does one child of Satan really amount to, at days end? Lubrication by which to ease the inevitable transition ever downward?"

"You remember the Ark?" Temperantia poked a finger differentially towards the sky. An ironically clear and near cloud free blue sky; pock marked only by a pair of birds twirling idly in some afterthought of a seasonally inappropriate mating dance. "Suppose it to be a bit like this? You think She's... ticked off again?"

"She always was a bit... temperamental." Gula grunted, fishing the nail of his index finger about between his teeth. He pulled a face as Temperantia swatted him for what was, given _who_ he was, a typically indulgent statement. "Oh, come on, love! You know that's a fair assessment! She's the equivalent of a drunken great aunt sitting on a stairwell with a glass of straight gin after a party in which no one complimented her shoes. Taking a lash at anyone what ticked her off and then pretending later that there was some deeper meaning behind it."

"This is the Almighty about whom we are speaking." Luxuria reminded. She was not altogether in disagreement of this assessment ( _goodness knows she had known the Lord just as long as any of them)_ but this was still the One whom had substantially more power over any of them. She may very well have been the only one, but that power wielded was quite enough to keep them all ticking along congenially enough. "She has her reasons for doing what requires doing. We know better than most anyone why."

"Not entirely why." Said Castitas. She was a Virtue, not an angel. Questioning was well within her capabilities. "But never mind the intricacies of it. The pondering is pointless. The how and the why intrigues me more."

"Ira." Humanitas said and the word was enough to close down whatever energy had been driving the conversation. It was as near as taboo a topic as the Vices and the Virtues might ever broach. He did in fact, broach it all the same. "Have any of you been in touch with Patientia?"

Luxuria replied. "She felt him. He arrived. Almighty only knows how. But he arrived." Her eyes, those eyes the colour of the sweet, purple lily, spanned the group. The column of her beautiful throat observably rose and fell. "He's on his way."

"Well... God only help the poor bastard what sent him there, that's all I can say."

Temperantia glanced at Gula, who was slogging back what had to have been about his tenth full fat latte with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.

"It was God Herself what sent him there, love."

"Yes, but via having granted the instructions to that poor angel what was charged with clipping his wings and installing his prison. Wrath does not discriminate. He will apply his rage to that whom he feels slighted him. And God is out of the reach of one even so profligate as rage."

They sat a few moments in silence; allowing the swirl of customers to bustle about their business, plainly agitated by the presence of some many conflagrating emotions all but battering at the borders of their spirits.

"Do we know if there are any interlopers?" Castitas asked, tucking one foot behind her ankle in that ever so prim way what seemed proper with the women of the upper class in any such ages past. Temperantia glanced up ever so briefly, taking stock of the entirety of the world in that one seemingly innocuous gesture alone, before delicately plucking up her cup and sipping from the still nearly full contents.

"Just the usual. The two earthbound agents."

"We expect any trouble whence they're concerned?"

"I shouldn't think so. They're charming sorts, but not the brightest. The Angel would be the one to worry about most, I should think. He's the combative. The demon has nothing in the chambers." Humanitas, having only taken a quick sip from his coffee, exclaimed softly, bringing an appropriately bronzed and patched satchel around to perch in his lap. He petted the palm of his hand against the bulges permeating the aged sides. "Which reminds me. I have a book what needs returning."

They all sat in quiet repose a while longer. Sipped from their drinks. Watched the world as it was passing by.

A storm would soon be coming. They should enjoy the peace while it lasted.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Las Vegas Arcade, Soho~** _

In a gaming arcade, not so far removed from the café in which the spattering of Virtues and Vices were enjoying their drinks, three demons and four angels, shielded from the Vices spells by very complex magic, were doing their utmost to look as though they weren't in fact attempting to have a clandestine meeting.

It was proving difficult. The young humans gathered within the complex seemed to be staring at them an awful lot. And that was even before Hastur had near discorporated himself in an attempt to thrash the living Heaven out of one of the pimply little pricks at _Dance, Dance Revolution_. It had, in hindsight, been a poor choice of location, Gabriel conceded. Anywhere that dancing might inevitably occur proved far too tantalising a distraction for demons.

At least Lord Beelzebub seemed focused, which was par for the course. Perhaps a little _too_ focused. They were currently taking out their intense irritation on a game of _Whack-a-mole_ , to the point in which the angel had started to feel genuine empathy for the inanimate plastic beasts.

"Well, _that's_ going to be an awkward one." Hastur remarked between deep, wheezing gasps; barely holding himself up over the frame of the machine Beelzebub was currently so engaged with. His legs had all but given up the pretence of being in any way shape or form capable of supporting a human body and draped along the floor behind him like so much bedraggled river kelp.

"It's the only loophole we can glean from the contracts." Michael remarked, visibly wincing and closing their eyes in response to one of Beelzebub's more vicious bommy knocker applied assaults. "They're no longer affiliate agents. They have been discharged."

"Why should that make any difference if angels that have been damned from Heaven are still subject to the contract?" Dagon asked, contentedly toying with the yo-yo she had purchased by having exchanged the tickets she had won from the _Dunk-a-shot_ machine nearby. She was quite proficient at some of the tricks already, Gabriel begrudgingly acknowledged. Especially the walking the dog one, which she seemed to be taking some strange esoteric delight in executing over and over and over again.

"Damnation was not considered, by the letter to be actual _discharge_ from active duties. It was... project reassignment, if anything." Uriel said, hands set routinely behind her back and trying to pretend as though she hadn't yet been on the receiving end of any number of knocks from the enthusiastically wielded plastic yo-yo. Her shins in particular, were staring to feel particularly bruised. "An altering of a set standard of responsibilities. The demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale have been struck from active duty. They are _free agents_."

"Freelancers. As are the Contingency Team." Beelzebub smacked a protruding mole head with the broaching of such genuine gleeful vehemence that they left a concave mark in the creatures plastic head. It seemed to retreat back into its hole just that enth degree faster than those which came before it.

"We looked over our original contracts. There _is_ a loophole." Sandalphon contributed, nose wrinkled as was becoming something of the norm for when he was forced into the same relative confines as the demon Hastur. All that sweat that the lousy bastard had oozed out during his unnecessary dancing fit was so much an assault on the senses it ought truly be considered an executable offense.

"Agents discharged from active duty will no longer be subject to the stipulations, expectations and contractual obligations as are so set forth in these divine agreements." Gabriel quoted from memory. He was good at that; remembering things. Par for the course of being God's direct messenger. "They shall henceforth be permitted to act upon and do so forthwith as they do wish, with neither fear nor expectation of reprisal or consequence, exempting those which are exacted by the individually acting agents of either realm from which set individual hails."

"They're the exception." Beelzebub said, bomber knocker at the ready as the plastic moles now quivered with some recently acquired somatic fear in the confines of their acrylic burrows. "We discharged them. They're no longer bound by the contracts."

"Exactly. Take into account their inexplicable immunity to Holy water and to Hell Fire respectively-"

"-they're perfectly geared, so to speak."

Hastur groaned, smacking his forehead into the side of the console so hard that it rousted each of the moles out from their holes in squealing unison. "This is going to be a _bloody_ nightmare. As if the flash bastard wasn't smug enough already."

Beelzebub didn't say anything, though they were ever so much in agreement. Instead, they continued to quietly take out their frustration on the innocent heads of the plastic moles, which served as ever so much a poor replacement for the head that they would be much prefer to be caving in.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**~A.Z Fell & Co~** _

With the exception of a spattering of red wine stains and the oft errant chest hair, Crowley never left much behind in Aziraphale's bookshop.

There were times he had crashed there, true. But he had always, without fail, scooped up his accumulative belongings before swanning on out the door the following day. It was important, that. Especially given that Aziraphale's once Heavenly affiliated work colleagues had made a habit of just showing up unannounced to check in on the progress of their earth bound angel. It wouldn't do for them to stumble across a jacket, or a sock or indeed a set of boxer briefs emanating the manner of odour most celestial agents would register as being of 'evil origins'.

Crowley had always been considerate so as to never land Aziraphale in this manner of predicament.

He hadn't been so careful following the Apocalypse.

He had left a singlet.

Aziraphale might not have even noticed it was there. It would seem that the demon had perhaps kicked it with the heel of his foot when showering one morning and had sent it skirting up under the piping of the sink. It had likely been there the better part of three to four months. There was a spattering of filmy cob webs adhered to it.

Aziraphale had taken to smelling it.

It had shocked him at first, because the singlet had been sitting there, stewing in its own juices for all those months. He had expected, upon unearthing it, that it would smell positively atrocious. He was surprised to find the odour quite subtle, in fact. Hardly what you might even _call_ an odour.

If you were to ask Crowley what it was that Aziraphale smelt like, he would likely reply: _"Sugar and spice and all things tooth corrodingly nice_ " and then perhaps follow it up with _"Lavender, talc, fancy cologne and pious restitution"._ His was a scent Crowley knew all too well, for his sense of smell was in fact much stronger than most any other being on the planet. Most demons were like that, in fact. Once they had grown accustomed to a particular scent, they would be able to ferret out whatever was associated with said scent in fairly short order.

Crowley had known Aziraphale's scent long before Lavender, talc, fancy cologne and sugar and spice had been invented. Back then, he might have best described it as a sort of warm, clean smell. Similar to that of a newborn baby, if one must draw comparisons. It had helped, the addiction he had developed concerning Aziraphale's particular scent.

If in a direct crosswind, Crowley could tell precisely and from what direction Aziraphale was travelling. If the angel were not in the immediate vicinity, a good whiff of the air would inform Crowley as to what direction he was in. He could not always sense just where exactly Aziraphale was, but he could rightly tell whether or not the angel was in fact present and to which direction his presence was situated. Such as that very special time in France, when Crowley had all but ( _unbeknownst to Aziraphale)_ furiously doggy paddled across the English channel sensing that the angel had gone far astray of where Crowley had last left him. What you get really, for leaving an angel unattended for the better part of fifty years.

Angels, though ever so adept at sensing love ( _not so keenly when it came to the natural divergent borders encapsulated within a demon's earthly body, however_ ) had a rather much poorer sense of smell. Not very different, one would say, to that which belonged to a human.

Aziraphale might, if indeed having been asked as to how Crowley smelt and being recovered enough from the inherent strangeness of being asked such a question, say: _"Somewhat the more expensive designer brand of cologne likely ordered from some television catalogue, whatever liquor he might have been drinking and something subtle yet ever so akin to burnt toffee"._ (This was of course the preternatural imbuement of sulphur which lingered within his ethereal spirit. Perhaps Crowley smelt the slightest bit better, Aziraphale reasoned, because he was ever so slightly sweeter than his demonic bed fellows. Of course he would never suggest such a thing to Crowley. Though the demon hadn't at all minded when Aziraphale had mentioned that he smelt of toffee. He had affected a strut ever so peacock like for the better part of three decades following this particular admission.)

The singlet had smelt of all these things. There was the ever so slight pinch of sweat smell but not much, for Crowley, as he had himself stated, did not perspire heavily. And he was a very fussy, fastidiously clean individual, as a point of personal pride and, predominantly, because he enjoyed taking care of his earthly body, just as much as he did his car and his wings. To wit, the majority of his clothing items smelt very little of anything so much as unappealing as body odour but rather more of the nicer side of things that he contributed to his skin.

Aziraphale had rather shocked himself with the sniffing of the stowaway singlet. He had taken a perfunctory whiff, such as you would _(for whatever the reason)_ before ferrying the clothing off towards its inevitable water boarding in the washing machine and then found himself coming to a stop whence halfway across his shop. He had taken the garment in both hands, given it the ever so slightest, nigh unconscious knead and then brought it back up to his nose. Closed his eyes as he inhaled much harder and deeper than earlier; pulling in as much of the smell as possible. So deeply, he would hardly have been surprised if the scent had shot on right through every channel of his brain and lodged itself firmly in the rear of his skull.

The cologne. The unmistakeable scent of scotch. The burnt toffee.

It was all there.

It was all _Crowley._

He didn't even care that there was a curly chest hair sticking up out of the material. Or at least, what he had _convinced_ himself was a chest hair.

It had been two months, eight days since Crowley had asked for some time. For some space.

There had been nothing in the means of space between them that scant week earlier, when Aziraphale had miracled himself into the passenger seat of Crowley's Bentley and gotten his lips vigorously kissed for his efforts.

The kiss.

Oh dear Lord. That _kiss_...

Aziraphale still had his face buried in the singlet. The hair was tickling at his eyebrow. He barely registered it. Crowley's scent brought it all back with all the sharpness and clarity of a tattoo gun. Or so he imagined. He didn't have a tattoo. Not a physical one, anyone.

The width of his eyes. Those big, somehow vulnerable and deeply beautiful eyes, which never looked alarming to him so much as in perpetual, wanting need of validation, of warmth. Of reciprocation.

Eyes which had moved to look down at his lips. Only mere moments before he claimed them with his own.

The set of his jaw, pushed forward, lip jutting at that ever so petulant angle. So much Crowley. So very much Crowley that near piranha like expulsion of the lower jaw.

The arch of his cheekbones beneath Aziraphale's fingers...

Crowley's palm cupped to his cheek; not at all possessive but loving, reverential, of need, of great, irrepressible _need._

That the kiss had _not_ been perfect. Which made it ever so uniquely and utterly _them._ They had never done anything perfectly. Why should their first kiss be any different?

The feel of Crowley's lower lip moving in between his own. How he had pushed ever so slightly downward with it; creating that gap by which to glance his tongue to the space suddenly formed between Aziraphale's teeth...

The angel felt his traitorous human body stir once more at the memories.

Oh, he was no better. He had _wanted_ it to continue. Quite as much as his terrible human body did.

The closeness of it. The abject, incomparable and exquisite _closeness_.

It was what had been missing. What Crowley had clearly been intimating had been missing all these years. That shift in dynamic, yes. That transmutation into something infinitely... _more._

He didn't wash the singlet. Not right away. He missed Crowley, after all. And the smell helped. Quite as much as it hurt.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you as always for taking time out of your day to read, my lovelies. If you enjoyed and feel comfortable doing so, please feel free to leave a kudos, a comment. Even concrit, if you see room for improvement :)
> 
> Wishing you all so much happiness in your own lives and, as always, with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	16. Or, in which Aziraphale takes a woman out for dinner.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale stuttered, feeling once more that ever more intrinsic need to permit himself some lenience. To share with someone, so as to help alleviate the pain what he was feeling inside. He was acclimated to it in some ways; he'd had a good six thousand years to learn how to compartmentalize, after all. But this... this situation was rather more catawampus than most any of which preceded it. 
> 
> "I'm not at all sure how I am supposed to go about fixing it this time around. I've always found it rather the simple process to forgive Cr-Anthony, but I suspect that forgiving me is something he may not be able to do quite so easily. It's..." He bit his lip, a gesture Alice found so utterly adorable that her already sluggish body near schlepped beneath the dinner table to see it. "...hard to give him the space he wants, when all I want is to go to him. I'm accustomed to being able to fix things and now... now I don't rightly know where to start. I fear I've done irreparable damage."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens, its assorted angels, demons and the like, are the beautiful brainchild of Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Thank you, kind sirs, for lending us your babies with which to play with for a while :)
> 
> A/N: As always, my thanks to all you wonderful pepes for taking time out of your way to read and show support for the story. I appreciate it so much, especially right now. To be honest, there's some stuff going on in my life at the moment which is really tough and editing this story has been a virtual godsend. So thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving up some of your day to spend with it. It makes me so happy to share it with you all :)
> 
> Here's hoping that you enjoy the chapter!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Sunday, April 7th - 2019~** _

_**A.Z Fell & Co's** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

Crowley had invented selfies. So, it would hardly be a surprise to anyone that he did of course, have a number of social media accounts.

He had quite a collection of them, in fact and had for some time. Of course, none of them had ever been able to include Aziraphale. Not whilst they had both been kowtowing to their respective realms. This had changed following the Armag-Don't-even-bother. Crowley did in fact seem to relish the chance to plaster all his social media platforms with pictures of himself and Aziraphale; a sort of systematic 'fuck you' to the powers that be.

He had a rather ridiculous number of followers. Aziraphale hated to think just how he had attained quite so many.

Aziraphale had cause to wonder such things, because he was in fact engaged in something of a desperate act. An act he never before considered himself ever having been brought to, come Hell or... well, high water, appropriately enough.

He was stalking Crowley's _Facebook_ page.

Very slowly. On his rather antiquated computer. With its very poor Internet connectivity. ( _Poor Aziraphale had no idea he could link up to the Internet on his new Smart Phone, of course; which would have reduced the inherent frustration that he was experiencing on account of his computers seemingly inexplicable need to buffer every few minutes_ ).

Aziraphale never paid much attention to 'social media' in the past. That sort of thing was of no particular interest to someone like him. It seemed very facile and superficial, really. He couldn't quite understand Crowley's appreciation for the seemingly unabashed 'showing off' mentality of it.

Aziraphale spent an inordinate amount of time looking through Crowley's photos. It had, as a direct result, made him feel extremely naïve, narrow minded and ignorant.

Such captions of the two of them eating out at some restaurant, where Crowley had written: " _Dinner out is always a treat with this one. Even when I'm shouting_." And a whole mess of things prefaced by the hash tag symbol, which Aziraphale could not even pretend to understand. One picture in particular, which Crowley had taken whilst all but falling over the back of Aziraphale's study chair, arm about Aziraphale's shoulders and phone hiked up high above their heads, had garnered quite a few likes and love hearts from Crowley's plethora of Facebook 'friends' read: _"When you want attention and he wants to READ. Desperate times, amiright?" #snekvsbook_

Aziraphale took his reading glasses off and set them aside. Pinched his fingertips to the bridge of his nose and sucked in a deep breath, cutting off the wave of emotion that swept up suddenly inside of him.

It hit him. Just what it all _meant_.

Crowley was sharing him. Sharing _them._

Unashamedly. With the world as his audience. His confessor.

He wasn't _afraid._ Not at all. With Hell off of his back, he was proud and staunch and unapologetic with his affections. It was obvious. Obvious from the loving, doting nature of the comments to which he had affixed any number of photographs he had taken of Aziraphale. Not all of which included Crowley.

_"When you've worked a full day and still go outta your way to pick up that bottle of red. Hope the bastard knows how lucky he is."_

_"Nice sunset. Too bad about the bloody ducks."_

_"Ain't that a smile and a half? Should do his own toothpaste commercials."_

_"Hair seems fluffier than usual. New shampoo?"_

And then, what really clinched it, so far as Aziraphale was concerned. A photograph which he _remembered_ being taken. Not so long after they had imbibed their first inaugural sip of champagne at the Ritz, having swapped back bodies following their near executions at the hands of their respective realms. A picture Crowley had insisted on taking of the two of them; his smile slightly giddy, Aziraphale's soft and light as ever. Champagne flutes a merrily hoisted towards where Crowley's phone had been perched at the end of his distended arm.

The caption read: _"When you realize you damn near lost everything, but_ gained _everything instead. Cheers to you, ya bastard."_

Aziraphale had quite a time remembering when last he had cried. He wasn't at all sure that he had. Not really. Not truly.

He did then.

_"Just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing."_

_And just enough of a bastard to not at all be worthy of you, my dear. Not in the very least._

Crowley's relationship status was set to _"It's complicated._ "

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Monday, April 8th - 6:00pm~** _

_**The Greenhouse - London...** _

He had arranged for a quaint table at one of his very favourite restaurants. It was quite pricy.

Needless to say, Alice was every inch out of her element. She relaxed considerably however, the second she approached the table and saw the gentleman she had come to recognise as Alexander Fell rising from his seat and smiling in such a reassuring manner that it immediately set her nerves to rest.

"Good evening, my dear." He said and in doing so, just about reduced her to dribbly goop in her seemingly more unsuited by the moment K-mart brand high heels. Because... _wow._ She had heard Anthony's stories of course and he had been quite definitely correct in saying that a picture of Alex did not do the piece at all the justice it deserved.

He was a little chubby. He wore a tartan bow tie. His outfit looked smart and well cared for but considerably outdated. His hair was stark white, though he did not appear to be much older than his late-forties and it looked as soft as a cloud with ever so slight curls towards the tips.

His eyes were _beautiful_. There was no other words by which to adequately describe it. The effect of his smile; warm, genuine and ever so deeply imbued in those soft and gentle looking blue-green eyes was almost debilitating.

_Oh my God... if he's not the absolute cutest fucker what ever existed._

"You look lovely." He further remarked and though it was quite obvious ( _at least from her limited human perspective_ ) that he was as camp as a row of tents, she still found herself blushing.

"Alex. It's so nice to meet you, finally." She stepped up to the table. "Alex" took her ever so gently by the hands and lent a brief kiss to each of her cheeks. He gestured for her to turn, so as to permit him to assist with the removal of her coat. She melted a little more. "This is very fancy, isn't it?"

"Oh, it's very nice." Alex ( _Well, Aziraphale as_ we _best know him_ ) remarked, folding Alice's coat across his arm. He shuffled over to pull her seat out, tucked it in once she had properly installed herself and then gestured towards the coat room. "Do make yourself comfortable. Won't be but a moment."

Alice took a sip from her water, found herself sitting up much straighter and tighter than usual. She cast surreptitious glances about the restaurant; at the dim lighting, the ever so elegantly dressed persons perched up at near every table. It had a sort of quiet air to it what most restaurants she ordinarily frequented did not possess. Soft music played in the background. It was terribly... ambient, she supposed.

And quite so far, the nicest dinner date she had ever shared with a man. Platonic or not. And all she'd had was a sip of water.

Aziraphale returned from the cloak room, smiling still and slid down properly into his own seat.

"Thank you once more for agreeing to meet with me. I hope you don't think it terribly presumptuous, but I took the liberty of ordering a bottle of _Dom Perignon 2006_ to share over dinner. My way of saying thank you for putting you in no doubt something of a terribly awkward position."

He had no sooner said this, than had a waiter appeared with two glasses of champagne. Aziraphale beamed radiantly at him, much as it seemed was his way with near everyone and uttered a soft 'Thank you' as the young man deposited their drinks upon the table.

"Oh, my god. Um... thank you." Alice said, smiling. Chuckling a little as she picked up her glass. "Thank you so much. That's... that's really sweet."

She held her glass out to him and they tapped them together. She took a sip. It was quite easily the most delicious drink she had ever tasted in her entire life. She actually put a hand to her chest as she lowered her glass back to the table.

"To be honest," She said. "I feel a little out of my depth. I don't... this isn't normally the sort of place I come to."

"Rest assured, that everything is on me tonight. You are granting me a kindness. It is the least I can do after messaging you out of the blue, like that." Aziraphale plucked his serviette up off of his place setting and whipped it out to its full length, laying it across the plain of his lap. Alice mimicked him, quietly relieved that a waiter hadn't taken the opportunity to do so. That might have felt just a little _too_ awkward. "Please, do take a look at the menu. Order whatever you like."

"Oh, no, no I couldn't possibly. I'll just have something li-" Alice's eyes just about bugged from her skull as her eyes locked on something partway down the centre page. "Oh my god, they have _lobster!_ "

"By all means, order it if it pleases you." Aziraphale said, looking plaintively unconcerned as he glanced over the menu for any recent additions he hadn't yet taken stock off. He had his set favourites, of course but it was always good to extend your palette where possible.

"It's far too expensive."

"Nonsense. If money can be spent on providing some further enjoyment to the world, then it is money _well_ spent." He took another sip of champagne, took one finger off of the glass to gesture towards her menu. "I insist. If you do not order it, well I shall have no choice but to order it myself and set it down in front of you. Or send it home in a doggy bag or some such thing."

It raised a question of which Alice, and a few of the girls at the Grange had been pondering for some time, though hadn't felt at all comfortable raising it with Anthony (Aka: Crowley). It seemed she was now in as good a position as any to get the skinny.

"If you don't mind my asking," She said, setting down her menu and taking another sip from her glass. Aziraphale raised his brows amenably. "Speaking of the money thing... I mean... Cumquat drives this restored old Bentley-"

Aziraphale's brow twitched ever so slightly. "Cumquat?"

"Oh, that's what we call him at work. He didn't like Ant. Said it was too 'creepy crawly', whatever that means. So he got Cumquat." She lifted her own brown meaningfully. "Because he's a bitter little fruit."

Aziraphale thought this terribly apropos and could hardly keep from chuckling in response to it.

"Anyway... he drives this old Bentley which is in perfect condition, he wears designer clothes and expensive shoes and has a flat in the posh area of town..." Alice raised her hands in a universal expression of confusion, cocking her head slightly to the side. "Clearly he's doing all right for money. Why then is he working a low income job at a nursing home?"

Aziraphale didn't feel it would make much sense to inform the young lady that it had been he himself who had all but manipulated Crowley into joining the workforce, because he was a recently expunged demon from Hell who was finding his days hard to fill. And that the only reason for Crowley being so affluent in the first place was because he had magicked up every single pound that he had, rather than sincerely earning but a dime of it. The angel thought quickly on is feet however, and offered up in favour of an honest explanation:

"Ah, well. You see... Anthony came from something of a wealthy family." He paused a moment as the waiter whisked up to the table and deposited a bread roll to each of their side plates. Aziraphale made a cut down the middle of his and applied a good lashing of butter to each still warm portion. "He had quite enough to set himself up, but he had a... falling out with them some time ago."

Alice gave Aziraphale a sympathetic look, reaching across the table and cupping her palm about his wrist.

"Because he's gay?"

Aziraphale dithered on this a moment before rationalizing that there was an element of truth behind Crowley's being discharged from Hell on the basis of his affiliation with an angel. Though it did of course have nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality, but rather with his consorting with the enemy. Again, quite a bit more difficult to explain to a human.

"Well... you might say that our relationship played a part in it, yes." He finished spreading the butter onto the piece of bread and took a small bite. Savoured the creamy texture and the warmth which flooded his mouth before swallowing and then dabbing the corners of his mouth with his handkerchief. "But Anthony, as you can no doubt already appreciate, knows his own mind far too well."

"Doesn't he just?"

"He's very self-sufficient. And when he works, he works hard. He's quite proud in that sense." And so, having naturally stumbled headlong into the very queries of which he had been so desperate to make, Aziraphale set down his bread, winding his fingers together and hesitating but a few moments. It felt terribly wrong to put someone in this position. And yet he simply could no longer abstain from doing so. "How has he been? I'm so terribly worried about him."

"I think we're all a bit worried about the bitter old fruit, to be honest." Alice said, leaning back in her seat and taking another sip from her champagne. She was started to feel significantly more relaxed. The alcohol was helping. 'Alex's' easy manner was the main contributor. "He's going out almost every night. Drinking to the point he can't drive but insisting he can 'sober up anytime he wants'. I'm surprised he's not in the early stages of kidney failure yet."

"Yes, he did always enjoy the odd tipple." Aziraphale remarked, finding the fact that Crowley was taking himself out and about to conduct his heavy drinking to be the truly bizarre factor in this scenario. Crowley had always enjoyed drinking and given that he had been doing it a long time, his tolerance for alcohol was ostensibly greater than that of most any human. It no doubt looked incredibly startling from an outside perspective however. "Is that having an impact on his work?"

"Well that's just the thing. No. Not at all. He's amazing at work. He's so dedicated. We could honestly use a few more like him." The waiter drifted briefly up on the tides once more to ask if they would like some more time to peruse the menu. Alice advised that they would. He drifted on back whence he came and she continued: "He never comes in hungover. Not that you can tell, anyway. Always well presented and tidy-"

"Oh. Is he taking care of his work uniform? I've been concerned that he might end up ruining it by accident."

Alice shook her head. "Fine. It's fine. It's always clean. Works out any stains he gets on it. Doesn't seem to be an issue." She sipped from her glass again, wondering if it would be too forward to ask for a top up over dinner. This first one was going down far too easily. "He hasn't been hooking up with anyone. Just so you know."

Aziraphale blinked; quite honestly unfamiliar with the term. "I beg your pardon... hooking up?"

"Going home with people. Snogging anyone. You know. Had his offers though. Random Soccer Mum seems _really_ keen. Wouldn't be surprised she follows him into the Men's one night, tries to have her wicked way with him up against the sink. Think it would be obvious, wouldn't you? That he's not... well, _you know_. I mean that _walk_ , for one." She was babbling, though not from anxiety such as she had been expecting. It was simply that 'Alex' was so easy to talk with. "Suppose she think's she's got a chance of 'changing him'. Good luck with that, I reckon."

It should not have come as such a relief to Aziraphale to hear that Crowley had been... well, was _faithful_ really the right word? It wasn't as though they were traditionally engaged with each other in such a way so as to naturally exclude the possibility of 'hooking up' with others but still... He acknowledged that it _did_ come as a relief. That Crowley was not in fact drinking himself into such a state that copulating with a human seemed a reasonable thing of which to partake. Alice could see that this has been welcome news to the man she believed to be called 'Alex'. He looked far the more saddened than he did pleased by it, however. And it was strange, because she could almost swear that his was a sadness which seemed to leach right on into the borders of her own heart and set up shop there. As though it were... contagious.

"Well it... it hardly comes as a surprise that he would receive offers." Aziraphale sipped much more deeply from his wine than he had intended. But rather felt as though it had been needed. "He's very handsome. Very clever. Terribly good company."

"Yeah, but he's _so_ loyal, hun." Alice said, taking up her own roll and splitting it down the middle. She felt a little rough for doing it by hand but 'Alex' didn't seem the least bothered. "He doesn't even flirt with anyone. He's just civil. Think you're the only one he's got eyes for."

"I see." Aziraphale considered the other half of his roll and felt an ever so strange and wholesomely unfamiliar thing. The sensation of having lost his appetite. "Has he... I mean... has he spoken to any of you as to why we're spending... time apart?"

Alice had taken rather a too large a bite of her bread roll. She tucked in another sip of her champagne to help soften up the overzealous portion and managed to get it down without embarrassing herself too much. 'Alex' was kind enough to pretend not to have noticed. "He's pretty private about that sort of thing. Said you're taking a break to work through some stuff." She wondered just how much she should tell the ever so endearing man sitting opposite her. 'Anthony' would likely be mad, should he have found out but what point was there in leaving things hanging like this? They were clearly both miserable from being apart. If it could help to fix any of this mess. "...He did have himself a right proper teary after karaoke the other night. Stupid bastard sang that song 'Clarity', nearly had the whole place bawling. Got back to the table, we're all blubbering all over each other, telling our break up stories. In amongst all that mess he goes and says that he feels like you're... ashamed of him."

Aziraphale could not have felt the more confused and astonished by this then if it had been spoken to him in Ancient Sanskrit. "But that... but that's _absurd._ "

"What he said was, is that he feels like you're afraid to properly invest in him because you're afraid of it 'changing' something about you. We... kind of just assumed that meant you were... still in the closet, or something."

"Well, it's not so incorrect an assumption." Aziraphale acknowledged, thinking that even now he was having ever so trying a time attempting to extract himself entirely from Heaven's lint lined ephemeral pocket. Say what you want but the hooks they sank into your spirit sunk deep and held fast. "Perhaps I am a little... afraid. But that's my burden. It should never suggest that I'm ashamed of him. That he could actually... _feel_ that way..."

Alice, comfortable enough by this juncture to rest her elbow against the table, set her cheek to her fist and gazed warmly at the eloquently spoken man across from her. He seemed ever so sweet. All the hardness, anxiety and rigidity that might have otherwise captured her body and held court over it in an otherwise unfamiliar setting, just seemed to have sluiced away in the time she'd been sitting there. She couldn't quite put her finger on it. There was just... something. Something _... ineffable_ , about him.

"I think he feels like you're worrying about what everyone else in the world will think, rather than putting him and your relationship first. Which makes a bit of sense, when you think about it." She waved her hand about and took a smaller sip from her glass, trying to make the most of the modest amount remaining in the base. "I mean, I know you don't know me and it's not really any of my business but he's absolutely _crazy_ about you. He loves you to bits."

Aziraphale felt his heart near slam to a stop in his chest. He was quite certain the shock resonated right on through to his face; so resolute was its nature.

Love.

Not felt. Not understood to be present, to be underlying their every interaction with one another. But spoken aloud. Given form. Prescience.

Acknowledged.

Like the pictures.

Shared. Shown. Paraded. _Celebrated._

_"It's Complicated"._

"He... said that?"

She could see it had come as a surprise to him. Which seemed a very strange thing, for two person's who had supposedly been together quite as long as they had. Did they never say it to one another? Perhaps that was something older gay men were particularly reserved about?

"Said it on the first day we met him. He can be a bit shy but he got all cute when he was talking about you. Thinks you're the best thing since sliced bread. He's so proud of you. I think he just wants you to be proud of him too."

"I _am_ proud of him. I'm terribly proud of him."

"Does he know?"

"I should hope so." Aziraphale said, with the look of someone who was rather the more uncertain as to whether such a thing was true or not. And more the concerned by the moment that the answer was perhaps _not._

"Maybe don't hope. Maybe just tell him? Sometimes people need stuff spelt out to know that it's true. Especially a little hot house orchid like Cumquat." The waiter returned to the table, bringing a small plate with an even smaller sampling of food upon it. Alice was naturally somewhat confused by this. "Oh, we haven't ordered anything yet, though."

"It's a complimentary taster." Aziraphale smiled, gesturing towards the saucer with his hand. "Please. Help yourself."

Alice did as was encouraged and took a small forkful of what appeared to be a sampling of some fish based dish from the menu. As the flavour swirled about on her tongue, she felt what little of her that hadn't already melted into goop disintegrate entirely.

"Oh my goodness, that is _divine_."

Aziraphale smiled with soft irony as he took another sip from his champagne flute. "Or close enough." He said, more so as to amuse himself and gestured for the waiter to top up their glasses. Alice groaned softly, waving a hand at the flush she felt developing on her neck.

"Honestly, though. If Cumquat's stupid enough not to take you back, can I have you?" She could have done much worse than to be treated like a Queen every day. It was quite enough to make her good and certain that she was going to be divesting a stout clip about 'Anthony's' ears the following morning at work.

Aziraphale chuckled, glancing off to the side in not so much an embarrassed manner but rather a more thoughtful one. The idea of Crowley not... taking him back was more the pressing concern that such an otherwise contrary statement evoked. It was like a pinprick; seeming small and innocuous but one which had sunk in much deeper than it otherwise appeared to have done.

"I'm quite certain there must be suitable young gentleman who would glean more from your charming company than I myself, my dear." He smiled, reaching across to pet his fingers kindly to the back of her hand; chipped nail polish be damned. "Perhaps someone who you might also enjoy looking across the table at, rather than seeing this fussy, white haired old man staring back at you."

The champagne must have gone a little to her head, because Alice found she set her flute down just a touch too hard at this. Some of the delicious liquid within near splashed out onto the table and what a waste that would have been!

"Oh my God, you are _not_ old! And you're just making me love you more when you go and say adorable stuff like that." She supped a drop which had escaped from her glass off of her knuckle, unconcerned now as to composing herself to any such unimpeachable standard. "I can see why Anthony's so smitten with you."

"Oh, I hardly think that he's smitten." Aziraphale said, now quite definitely flirting with the borders of embarrassment. He found himself taking yet another more offbeat sip of his drink than he might otherwise have considered necessary.

"Then you're reading the cues all wrong." Such as earlier, Alice stinted as to whether or not she needed to be telling Anthony's jilted partner all the messy particulars of her colleagues various daring-do's. But having sat with the lovely man a while now, she cast a derisive 'fuck it' to the collective universe and decided that it was quite worth whatever it took to bring this pair of dopey sweethearts back together again. "You know, I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but-"

"What?" Aziraphale asked, eyes widening, setting his glass down. He looked so positively alarmed that Alice actually reached across the table to cup a hand about his wrist.

"He got into a fight the other night." The news did not come as any sort of salve to whatever alarm 'Alex' was currently nursing. He looked quite as much as though he were about to spring from his chair and launch himself out through the nearest window. "It's okay, he's fine. He was just mouthing like he normally does. Got himself a fat lip for his efforts. All but cleared up the next day, weirdly..."

Aziraphale hardly felt at all reassured by this. Oh, it wasn't as though it was the first time it had happened, of course. Crowley was quick witted, clever and prone to wielding his words in much the same manner that other less civilized beings might have wielded a dagger, or similarly sharp, cutty thing. It stood to reason that a lot of less cognitively established individuals would take exception to his fast tongue and particular brand of sarcastic tenderizing and respond in far less orthodox a fashion. This was particularly true of when they might have been out and about and drinking to excess. And this they had done quite a bit throughout the years.

Aziraphale had lost count of the times in fact, which he had been forced to step in. Though he was an angel, he was no stranger to violence. All frontline celestials were trained in their own particular brand of pugilist arts and he had once been one of the more adept at doing so. ( _Though he supposed not many cared to remember such a thing. He was not the least boastful about it and preferred the peaceful quiet of more gentile pursuits. You might say that his was a flaming sword more the often sheathed rather than paraded about at head height and heralding to all far and wide that it was a blade quite merrily prepared to shear limbs from otherwise needing torso's.)_

But Aziraphale could fight, yes. Though he did prefer to think of it as rather defending oneself and others; redirecting energy, whence required. He could disarm, subdue, subvert and waylay any number of flying fists, feet, broken bottles, wicker chairs and the whatnot and had done so many a more time than he could truthfully recall. Crowley was quite aware of Aziraphale's innate propensity to stand between himself and whatever harm might otherwise befoul him and more the likely took advantage of it, the angel thought.

Crowley was _not_ a fighter. He was a terribly good instigator and provocateur, but he was the sort who would prefer to shove an otherwise useful shield between himself and trouble. And that shield was, more often than not, Aziraphale.

Aziraphale had not always been at his side throughout those six thousand years, however. He was no fool and had no delusions as to this being the first time in history to which Crowley had received a cuff about the ear for giving cheek where it ought not have been bandied. It hit harder however, for this was a time when they were ever so much more isolated than they had ever been and more the such responsible for each others wellbeing. It reminded him of that very first time in the Garden of Eden, when Superbia had glanced their ringed hand off of the side of Crowley's face. Had set the seemingly confident serpent to trembling; a creature who clearly intended to present themselves as unshakeable but had indeed a tremulous core which was not so accustomed to harsh treatment.

A demon, yes. But vulnerable. So wise, so clever, so the more holistic in his consideration of most everything but beneath which dwelt something incontestably soft. And wanting. And ever so much in need of protection.

Aziraphale was failing him.

"Oh, that's so not like him. He hates confrontation. And I'm usually there for him to hide behind on oft occasion confrontation finds _him_." He set his glass down, tilted his head back and took a measured sigh. It was the most composed gesture Alice fancied she had ever seen. Ever so English and upper class in some ways. Ever so terribly refined. And quite tremendously brave, in others. "I'm ever so worried about him."

"Is this the first time you guys have had a big fight where you haven't been talking?"

"We've had a few. Nothing quite this serious, however. And to be honest, I'm usually the one giving the silent treatment and he's the one picking up the pieces." Aziraphale plucked up his courage, feeling a very strong need to share with someone; to divulge some of the emotional complexity of the situation and see whether they might, in their clumsy human way, assist him in navigating what was ever so unfamiliar and rather very human like muddy waters. They were good at this, the humans. They did it all the time; or so books and television told him. "It's just... I worry for him being left to his own devices. He's very clever of course but he can also be... quite vulnerable in his way. He doesn't take care of himself all that well and..." He realized, quite so soon as he had begun that he'd hardly a clue as to where he was going and turned back to his champagne, taking a rather more unapologetic gulp which near drained it down to its bellows. "I sound positively ridiculous to you, don't I, dear?"

"No, not at all," said Alice. Nearly two glasses in, one small taster to her name and not nearly enough food to keep up with the alcohol that she was quite the more unaccustomed to. She was feeling the slightest bit giddy and more than just the slightest bit emotional. The lower lids of her eyes had started to feel a little heavy; a little blurred. That... _sadness_.

It seemed a very real thing; much as might have been a drug injected directly into her veins and working its way through her heart and brain and whatever else such substances stole claim to. His sadness was like that, she vaguely thought, sipping once more from her glass and wondering even as she did just how big a cup of coffee she would need to balance this all out. It polarized her senses.

It had to have been his eyes. They were... _soulful._

She could completely understand where Anthony was coming from.

"It's dreadful to know that I've hurt him so badly. And to be quite honest I..." Aziraphale stuttered, feeling once more that ever more intrinsic need to permit himself some lenience. To share with someone, so as to help alleviate the pain what he was feeling inside. He was acclimated to it in some ways; he'd had a good six thousand years to learn how to compartmentalize, after all. But this... this situation was rather more catawampus than most any of which preceded it. "I'm not at all sure how I am supposed to go about fixing it this time around. I've always found it rather the simple process to forgive Cr- _Anthony_ but I suspect that forgiving me is something he may not be able to do quite so easily. It's..." He bit his lip, a gesture Alice found so utterly adorable that her already sluggish body near schlepped beneath the dinner table to see it. "...hard to give him the space he wants, when all I want is to _go_ to him. I'm accustomed to being able to fix things and now... now I don't rightly know where to start. I fear I've done irreparable damage."

"I'm sure it's not _irreparable_." Alice said, who, having had so many dozen irreparable relationships herself, was rather an uncontested authority on the matter. "Whatever problems you guys are having is reconcilable, surely? You're not beating the living shit out of each other. You're not lying and stealing and cheating on each other and doing drugs and abusing one another. It sounds like you're just having a little bump in the road."

"A rather big bump." Aziraphale stated with a nervous chuckle which belied the very real feeling of helplessness rooted at its core. "One large tree that's fallen right onto the road and there's no means to drive around it."

"Then get on out and hack it to bits with an axe. Chainsaw the bastard. Pull it apart with your bare hands if you've got to. Just don't give up on it." Alice sighed, wiped at her welling eyes. Her period was due and she was already emotional but _this_. She had expected some pompous, arrogant stuff shirt to whom she would only minimalistically tolerate the company of for the better half of an evening. Not a pompous stuff shirt who was so completely as sweet as pie and lovely and more the gentleman than anyone she had ever met in her entire life. It was too much. "I'm so sorry." She nearly sobbed, waving her hands at her eyes as tears threatened to spill out over her lower lashes. "I know this is going to sound so completely stupid but... I just wish I could _fix_ this for you. I don't even know you but I hate that you're hurting! You seem like... such a lovely person."

"Oh my dear, please don't cry," Said Aziraphale, passing over his spare handkerchief and gesturing for her to take it. As she wiped her eyes, he took her hand between his own and gave it a gentle squeeze. "I didn't ask you here so as I could impress upon you to intervene on my behalf with... Anthony. I simply wanted to know if he was _all right_. That is all. I would never ask for you put yourself in such an awkward position."

If he thought this would help, he couldn't be the more wrong. His genuine kindness and compassion was enough to cause Alice to tear up all the more. She had dated her fair share of bastards, users, abusers and cheaters. She had pinned her heart and her hopes on drug addicts, on liars, on passive aggressive underhanded bastards who would comment slyly from the corner of their lips that she could lose a bit more weight or that her bum wiggled just that too much when walking to the bathroom after sex.

That two perfectly lovely men like Anthony and Alex had found one another and yet found some reason so as to remain apart, was preposterous. It might have made her mad, if it didn't feel just so terribly wretched about it all. The world was thick with scum. She herself still felt stained most days _with_ that scum.

How could they not see how _lucky_ they were?

"Oh my God... now I just want to help you out more. Can I give you a hug?"

Aziraphale was not Crowley. He certainly wasn't one to turn down the offer of a hug if it were to come from anyone other than the person he most earnestly wished he could be holding at that moment.

He rather felt he needed a good hug. It was quite certainly thanks in return, he thought, for the generous serving of _Sous Vide Butter-Poached Lobster_ which graced the table to the accompanying rapturous squeals of his much appreciated confidante sometime after the fourth glass of champagne.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

"Can I ask you something?" She had queried at some point over dessert. Forcing Aziraphale's attention up and away from the dark chocolate ganache tart he was picking at distractedly. Ever so much a definitive indicator as to there being something terribly wrong in the angel's chemical makeup. "What do Anthony's eyes look like? None of us can get his glasses off of him to get a look."

"Beautiful." Aziraphale said simply, without thinking. Without apology. They were as round as the inlay of a saucer, as yellow as the harvest moon and ever the more missed by the moment.

He plucked a corner from the edge of his tart and left it where it fell sidelong and impotent upon the plate.

The chocolate, he thought, tasted like sawdust.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks for reading everyone, always very much appreciate the time spent :) Feel free to leave a comment or a kudos, if you would like to do so, and I will hopefully see you in the next chapter! 
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	17. Or, in which Lord Beelzebub gets back to nature.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Was this desire he was feeling a largely falsified sensation? A facet of a demon's innate drive to subvert and capitalize the nature of innocence? To corrupt? To indeed devour; much as he devoured the sight of Aziraphale taking such pleasure in partaking of a delicious meal most night after night?
> 
> Being alone. It... might not be a choice. It might indeed be something to which Crowley would be required to accustom himself.
> 
> Better that then allowing his jaws to unhinge. Swallowing alive the very person he cared for most in all the world. With no true insight as to whether this want was truly his alone, or something base and instinctual and entirely demonic.
> 
> He was not however alone that particular evening.
> 
> The sight of two very familiar demons leaning and perching apiece upon the bonnet of his Bentley came as a most unwelcome gift...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens is the property of persons who are not myself. This is a fanfiction site; I think it would be safe to presume that this is fanfiction.
> 
> A/N: Thanks as always to everyone who is reading, leaving kudos and commenting. Believe me when I say that every single one is absolutely appreciated and is coming at a time when I can really use those little feel-good pitter patters of the heart :)
> 
> Good Omens-ervation of the day: When Aziraphale and Crowley were reporting into Heaven and Hell in episode one, they entered the Broadgate Tower lobby at the same time. The. Same. TIME.
> 
> It's like; guys, HELLO? If you don't want your superiors catching on that you're 'fraternizing' with one another, maybe don't enter the building at the exact same moment. "Oh, it's a wonder Crowley hasn't spotted you, yet." SPOTTED HIM? Crowley probably gave him a LIFT to the bloody building and then they went out for dessert and brandy afterwards. (Rolls eyes)
> 
> Honestly, I think it says a lot more about the morbid stupidity of their superiors than it does Aziraphale and Crowley. They were practically wearing t-shirts with one another's faces on them and holding hands on park benches and no one thought to check the Celestial Security Camera feed until 2018, or whatever year it is the series was supposed to have happen. Hardly have cause to act surprised, guys!
> 
> Yet another update for you, gentle readers. I'm sorry this subdivision process isn't going quite as quickly as I had hoped. Lots of RL stuff going on at the moment and there is, actually, a bit more editing required with this than I expected. I promise I will get there as quickly as I can!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Monday, April 8th - 2019~** _

_**The Grange Estate Nursing Home** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

Crowley finished work at 8:35pm. He'd been there nine hours and might have left early if not for an incident having occurred with a client falling in the bathroom whilst attempting to use the toilet. He'd been taken into hospital for routine observation and Crowley had been held up pecking out an incident report.

Paperwork. One of the things he most definitely did not miss about the old job.

He was very tired and very ornery. He hadn't had a chance to really eat anything either and his human stomach felt tight with hunger pains. His chest hurt with thoughts of Aziraphale. His brain swirled with memories of the kiss they had shared.

 _What_ had he been thinking? If subtle insinuations slipped slyly into surreptitious place over the passing of sixty centuries was going too fast, than all but shoving his tongue into the angel's gob was equivalent to jamming the blessed thing into overdrive!

What was quite worse however, was that Aziraphale had not merely tolerated it. Which was what Crowley had been setting himself up to expect.

The angel had started to respond. Crowley had felt it. Felt it in the more obvious gestures of the hand upon his face, the accommodating parting of Aziraphale's lips. In more subtle variations, too. The sinking of each of his muscles, the slight push forwards, that ever so tiny dart of air inward...

 _Oh, I would have had you then. Have you have_ me _, one or the other._

He'd never felt so ravenous. It was a hunger he had never before understood. Not when it came to food, anyway.

Food was fine. Excellent at times. You picked away at it. It passed over your tongue, gave you a transient, temporary experience of satisfaction and pleasure. Passed on through. Not quite so elegant from then on out.

But a kiss... a kiss was ever the more delicious than anything else what had graced his lips in all his six thousand years on earth.

It was Aziraphale's kiss and his taste was _sweet._

Crowley was, in near direct juxtaposition to how Aziraphale supposed him to have been, every bit as confused as was the angel. He was frightened, to boot.

Frightened of himself.

There was so little free will in Hell, as there had been in Heaven. And the transformative sulphur possessed its own distinct set of inherent directives. Of drives. A blueprint which became ever so succinctly a part of a demon's structure as was the DNA code of a human being. Certain behaviours, emotions, reactions and learned and innate responses alike were integrated within this topography.

Demon's exalted in sin. In deceit. In temptation.

Crowley was especially adept at temptation. It was pretty much considered to be his _raison d'etre_ in times past.

This, quite so much as Aziraphale's struggles against the abstinent template what composed his own angelic soul, was to wit what Crowley struggled to pull apart and discern the differences of.

Was this desire he was feeling a largely falsified sensation? A facet of a demon's innate drive to subvert and capitalize the nature of innocence? To corrupt? To indeed devour; much as he devoured the sight of Aziraphale taking such pleasure in partaking of a delicious meal most night after night?

Being alone. It... might not be a choice. It might indeed be something to which Crowley would be required to accustom himself.

Better that then allowing his jaws to unhinge. Swallowing alive the very person he cared for most in all the world. With no true insight as to whether this want was truly his alone, or something base and instinctual and entirely demonic.

He was not however alone _that_ particular evening.

The sight of two very familiar demons leaning and perching apiece upon the bonnet of his Bentley came as a most unwelcome gift. He would prefer the loneliness, far more than the company of a pair of nether dwelling degenerates who would sooner see him reduced to blithering nothingness in a tub of Holy Water.

They hadn't yet caught wind of him. This was due, in no small part, to Crowley having holed up behind one of the large, decorative shrubs bordering the nursing homes gate. Resolutely finishing the cigarette he'd lit the moment he stepped snakeskin booted foot out the front door.

The breeze was in his favour. It was a still night and the air was blowing towards him. He'd caught Hastur's distinctive scent almost immediately, though he was quite certain even a human wouldn't need much help in this regard. That was one distinctly whiffy demon.

" _Shit, shit, shit._ " He quietly cursed, taking yet another drag from the dart and flicking ash beneath the hedgerow. A vehement snort proclaimed itself from somewhere beneath the tangled roots of the topiary, suggested he had likely upset another otherwise circumspect hedgehog going about their prickly business. "What do they want? Why _now_?"

It was a conundrum, to be certain. Crowley wasn't a fighter. Never had been. There were much cleverer ways to subvert conflict than to directly engage in it. He had in fact devoted a great deal of his six thousand years to systematically _avoiding_ conflict. Much like a snake he would turn tail at the first sign of the ground trembling and bite only when backed into a corner.

There _was_ however a more pressing matter at hand. One of which Crowley's racing, panicky mind lit upon with such sharpness of clarity that it voided much of the inert concern he had otherwise been hogging for himself.

If the demons had come for him, had the angels in turn come for Aziraphale?

This was a thought terrifying enough for him to conclude that hunkering in a bush for the next however so many hours was just not going to cut the mustard. He needed to get right on back into town as though all the demons of Hell were, appropriately enough, alit to the seams of his leather trousers.

And he wasn't about to go leaving his Bentley in the work car park. Where he went, so too did his car. All for one and one for all, and all that.

Crowley's quick mind stitched together something of a patchwork plan. It wasn't the most stylish of plans, but it would do. More to the point, it would serve its purpose and be ever so inherently satisfying to boot.

He snapped the fingers of the hand currently not occupied with the dwindling stub of his fag. The Bentley's engine roared to life, the lights snapping on and illuminating the hedgerow in front of it.

The demons had barely a moment to acknowledge that something was happening before, with a secondary snap of his fingers, Crowley sent the car screaming into reverse, resulting in Lord Beelzebub tumbling off of the bonnet and onto the road. _(Oh yes._ That _in itself was satisfying enough to warrant the lighting of another smoke)._

The car turned sharply, rocketed up to alongside the gate and swung its passenger side door open. Crowley flicked aside his expired filter, diving in through the open door and commando rolling into the drivers seat.

He flung his middle finger out through the window, tossed the crumpled ball of his work uniform into the backseat _(Aziraphale would have had a field day of disgust at this show of garment related disrespect_ ) and stapled the accelerator to the floor; speeding off out of the car park with a generous spritzing of gravel casting a wave over the pair of demons that were currently floundering about on the ground like a couple of blow flies on their backs.

"Get on after him, Hazztur." Beelzebub said, with far more composure then one might expect from a venerate being whom had been so inelegantly turfed onto the tarmac. Hastur, shaking gravel from his badly manifested weave of straw like hair, did something he never thought himself capable of doing. Disobeying a directive from his far the higher ranking and ever more deadly as a result, superior.

"Get on-? This bastards immune to holy water! I saw what he did to Ligur, I'm not jumping in a car with him! I discorporated the last time!"

"Fine." Beelzebub grunted and within a moment had snapped out of sight with a scent not dissimilar to that of a cap gun going off.

* * *

Meanwhile, in a Bentley now approximately three streets or so away, the _Greatest Hits of Queen_ was blaring ( _such was the norm)_ and the demon Crowley was feeling particularly pleased with himself. He was also attempting to drive one handed, whilst thumbing Aziraphale's mobile number with the other. The attempt was summarily shot to shit, by the appearance of Lord Beelzebub popping into existence in the passenger seat with an expression akin to someone who might have been stuck doing petty cash collation for the majority of a sunny Friday afternoon.

"Crowley." They said, in a voice of such flattened affect you would hardly have expected it to have roused any sort of alarm in return. Crowley to the contrary was extremely alarmed, finding Beelzebub's stowing away to lack quite the charm that Aziraphale's had done a few days earlier.

Once upon a time, Crowley might indeed have maintained a great deal of smarmy respect so far as the lord of Hell was concerned. These were not those times. He was no longer in hells employ. He owed no loyalty, no allegiance. And certainly not so much as anything resembling a modicum of civility.

Crowley snapped his fingers and the passenger side door blew open. In the same gesture, he twisted about his seat, bringing his knee up to his chest and lashing out with his left foot as hard as he could, striking the other demon square in the chest. The momentum might have driven the petite form of Lord Beelzebub right out onto the road, had they not snared the edges of the door with their fingers and waylaid their imminent ejection at the very last moment.

"What the heaven are you _DOING_ , you stupid idiot?!" They yelled, losing their cool for one of the very few times they had ever, so far as recorded history would suggest, done so. They pulled themselves back into the vehicle, encountering increased levels of resistance in the process. Crowley was a fairly flexible creature and he was putting this manoeuvrability to good use, having half twisted in his seat to employ the use of both legs now, keeping the accelerator pinned to the floor by pure force of imagination alone.

He peddled them wildly, as though he were riding an invisible bicycle, landing repeated strikes against Beelzebub's face, chest, arms and stomach. It resembled a couple of liquorice straps being whacked about by a group of kids doing jump rope in the schoolyard; such as you might have found in the days before mobile phones, drones and cyber bullying made the world a much better place for the likes of growing minds.

"Get the _fuck_ out of my car you maggot munching, shit-sniffing, _harpy from Hell!_ " Crowley yelled, grunting as one of Beelzebub's hands managed to squeeze through his onslaught and grab a hold on the front of his shirt. The car was fairly much hugging the curb now, the hubcaps shearing sparks all over the likes of frightened pedestrians and idling house cats alike. He barely avoided hitting a parked car, keeping the open door of the Bentley from being snapped off at the last moment. Thank... someone for his demonic reflexes or this would be even more of a ridiculous clean up.

"I want to talk, would you _SSZTOP_ , for the love of all that'z unholy?!"

Crowley took one hand off of the wheel and started slapping at Beelzebub's diminutive fist, attempting in rather poor fashion to dislodge it from his person. A couple of buttons popped free of his shirt and he felt the night air alight to far more of his chest than even he was comfortable having on display.

From the corner of his eye, he saw through the windscreen the great oak which had sprouted from the grass of the curb some hundred or so years past. It might have been lit in a holy light, such was its convenient appearance but there was, of course, nothing holy to be discerned in this instance. Divine provenance or not, it was a convenience and one of which he was all too happy to take advantage of.

"Go hug a tree." He said, bringing both knees up against his chest and executing some lumberly variant of a donkey kick, which otherwise had the intended effect he'd been going for.

Beelzebub was hurled spectacularly from the open door of the Bentley, slamming into the oak and all but wrapping themselves about the trunk with rib cracking complicity. Crowley snapped his fingers to bring the Bentley's door shut, twisted back into a regulation drivers position and pawed about on the floor near his feet. He found the phone, realised that the call he had been making prior to Lord Beelzebub's having humped barge, had actually gone through.

He set it to speaker.

Sounds of things crashing, thumping and lots of very incensed yelling. He recognised Aziraphale's voice. There were others as well. One more the distinct for how it was ever so perfectly burned into the nodes of Crowley's preternatural memory.

Gabriel. No mistaking that slimy, seersucker tone.

Crowley jammed his foot hard to the accelerator. There was no time to waste. And that was just taking into account the two or so police cars he needed to shake first.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

**_~Monday, April 8th - 2019~_ **

**_London, Soho... _ **

After piling Alice into a taxi and handsomely extolling the driver all the required funds to see her safely home, Aziraphale, sans the cash he might well have used to have taken a taxi in the opposite direction, was required instead to catch a bus back to the bookshop.

It wasn't so bad. It wasn't as though he was unaccustomed to taking the bus, after all. The driver was a great deal more conscientious than Crowley concerns safety. He did however miss the comfort of the Bentley. The seats were softer. And he had Crowley's company for another.

Aziraphale might usually have read a book, or caught up on the world's happenings in the newspaper; should he have either in his possession. Done a crossword or two. Being that he had just come from dinner, he of course hadn't bothered with carting such things along with him. It might have appeared rude to have done so. Instead, he used his time in an otherwise productive, through contrarily circulatory, inconclusive manner, to muddle over what Alice had told him during dinner.

About Crowley.

He was ever so worried as to how the demon was coping; or rather NOT coping it would seem. He wondered most of all about the reasons as to why Crowley felt he needed to maintain space between them.

He thought a very great deal about what Alice had said about Crowley feeling as though Aziraphale were ashamed of him.

It was heartbreaking, this particular thought. For Aziraphale might have felt any number of things where Crowley was concerned, but shame was most definitely not a one of them. Not in so far as _being_ ashamed applied.

Aziraphale did in fact feel ever so proud of him. Especially as of late. Crowley was a clever, funny, caring and wonderfully kind person, despite what protests he might have made to the contrary. He worked hard. He was wise and thoughtful and far more courageous than he, Aziraphale, could ever hope to be.

His thoughts drifted ( _as they so often did these days_ ) to the kiss.

He felt in turn that subtle stirring of desire flutter through his chest. The tightening which found space in the gnawing gap in what might otherwise have been a full and contentedly round and protruding stomach.

And once again, those ever present celestial spikes striking up into his mind; like having your fingertip burned for letting it to the edges of a hotplate.

It was immensely frustrating. He _wanted_ to think about the kiss. He _wanted_ to work through it, to explore his own desires concerning it.

He missed his stop; which would have to have been a first. It wasn't a long walk back. He cut his losses, muddling a few additional considerations over in the meantime. Barely missed being hit by cars whilst trailing across the road, distracted by all the tangled avenues which currently wove their befuddling pathways through the recesses of his human shaped skull.

What did the kiss entail? What sort of dynamic did Crowley envision their relationship taking on? Humans who kissed one another habitually developed a new means of interacting with one another. They held hands. They embraced. They kissed; sometimes for a _very_ long while. They ran their hands all over one another, sometimes across body parts that were not typically encountered between the likes of cut and dry friends.

They made love.

This was the one of which Aziraphale found most difficult to imagine accommodating naturally, if his and Crowley's relationship were to integrate a... physical component.

He quite liked the idea of holding hands. It seemed very warm and loving. As did the embrace. He felt a little more uncertain concerns the kissing and touching, for this encompassed a sexual element of which the angel was so far the rather unaccustomed to. But he HAD enjoyed the kiss, despite his having some natural reservations given his angelic status.

But _making love_.

One would be quite wrong to assume that Aziraphale had no such idea as to how these things worked. He'd been around a long time. He'd read many a book. He'd lived through the time of Caligula, which was a learning experience in and of itself. He knew how sex worked between men and women and those of the same sex alike.

And it was a quite wrongly perpetuated myth that homosexuality was considered to be sinful. God could not give two twaddles as to who you slept with, so long as the act was one of informed consent and did not incorporate the likes of children or animals. God wouldn't even care if a person jumped a lawn chair, if the urge so seized them. So long as the lawn chair was appropriately and consensually accommodating where said jumping was concerned, of course.

Besides, it wasn't as though they were in fact _men_. Not in so far as their preternatural spirits were concerned. But their bodies both currently _were_. And that was par the course the form that sex would take for them if they were to engage in the act. The ways in which two human males might initiate physical intimacy.

There could be no means by which to be _physically_ closer.

A thought that was every bit as replete with desire so much as it was anchored by angelic consternations.

Why did the thought of making love with someone to whom he clearly retained extraordinarily feelings of reverence and adoration make him feel somehow... cheap? As though he would be degrading both himself and Crowley in doing so?

It was true that sex was everywhere. The human race had quite a way of wringing the romance out of what Aziraphale viewed as a primarily loving, sacred act and commercialising it much as you might a new feminine hygiene product. Or worse, some sort of caffeinated energy drink.

It all seemed very nice in the books he had read. Especially the books from the days preceding the twentieth century; when it had all become a little bit tawdry. Sex had a sort of piquancy and mysteriousness back then. Now you were lucky if you had but a day when you were not bombarded in some way shape or form by someone's genitalia being all but shoved in your face with an offhand disclaimer concerning subsidiary exceptions to any most sale items not found within the greater London area slapped upon their right buttock.

To say nothing of making love with a _demon_. They had swapped bodies without any observable negative side effects but what would that level of intimacy truly entail? Would they in fact explode if they were to attempt intercourse?

Aziraphale was not quite so pure that he was immune to the double meaning of this internal statement and spent rather so long blushing in the company of himself, that he did in fact breeze right on by the bookshop. It was the ringing of his mobile phone what brought him back to reality. He turned most of his coat pockets inside out before locating the tiny device in the left hand interior compartment. His heart slammed in his chest when he saw Crowley's name and face appear on the screen ( _Crowley had of course taken the selfie himself_ ) and almost fumbled the phone out of his hand in his rush to answer it.

"Yes, hello. Crowley?" His enthusiasm sputtered to a stalling grind at the sounds which erupted now from the speaker of the phone. Not Crowley's expected terse reply to his ( _admittedly_ ) over eager greeting but what was distinctly the strains of Queen (the Bentley's ever eternal soundtrack) a whole lot of yelling and the exchange of physical blows.

 ** _-Shooting star streaking through the sky, like a tiger_** \- "of my car, you-" _(crack, smack, biffo)_ **-** ** _like lady Godiva, I'm gonna go, go, go-_** "- harpy from Hell!"

And another voice. A horrifyingly familiar voice which struck cold fear into Aziraphale's belly.

"- jussztt want to talk-" **_I'm burnin through the sky, yeah -_** "-stupid bastard!"

Beelzebub. Lord of both flies and infernal regions alike. Currently installed head of Hell. The most dangerous demon in existence.

There with Crowley; the most approachable and _least_ dangerous demon in existence.

"Crowley!" Aziraphale yelled, his outburst drawing the attention of a few passers-by, some of whom glanced between their respective companions in a silent question as to whether they ought do something beyond staring. (And or filming. A very millennial response, one might say). Aziraphale was not the least aware of them. "Leave him alone, you- you-" he felt those familiar barbs, warning him not to swear. They quite nearly worked. "- bloody... _bounder!_!"

There came a sharp, rather unexpected beeping sound in his ear. He checked the screen. Of all the stupid... he'd forgotten to charge the phone _again_. The battery was about to go flat.

Angelically cursing, heart pounding in his chest, Aziraphale rattled in his pocket for his keys and felt the left hand door of the shop sway inwards as he went towards it. He was so panicked he thought nothing of it in that moment and simply barrelled on through, spearheading for the study desk in which he kept his phone charger.

The Archangel Gabriel's toothy smile was waiting for him centre room, bracketed to one side by the Seraphim Sandalphon's usual solemn expression opined by upturned nose and an upper lip tucked so tight it might have resembled an army privates fitted sheets.

"Hi. Hope you don't mind but we let ourselves-"

He got no further than this before Aziraphale, responding with a high pitched shriek reminiscent of a tea kettle, hurled off and pitched the largest book he could lay his hands to. _(Ever so astute person's might recognize it as being the very same book what Gabriel had picked up when meeting with Aziraphale concerns the coming of the Apocalypse less than a year earlier)._ It thumped bodily into Gabriel's broad chest, dropping to the floor between his smartly booted feet.

"We just want to-"

Aziraphale had no interest in whatever it was that Gabriel wanted. For it was nothing nice, surely. These were the very same angels who had attempted to execute him ( _or rather Crowley posing as him)_ by Hellfire. The very fact that they'd had the cheek to just swan on into his home after everything that had happened, to _invite_ themselves in, to _stand there_ with those looks on their faces as though they had quite every right to impose upon the one place in the world that was his and his alone, set something to churning in Aziraphale's effervescent blood.

He would _not_ have it.

Once he might have simpered at their boots but those were days well and truly at his back. He had kept a civil tongue in the past, for he was a civil creature. There was likely no more a gentle, temperate being in all the world. Even the virtues of a Kindness and Temperance would have a run for their money where Aziraphale was concerned.

But his sanctuary had been invaded.

Crowley was in trouble.

And this was quite enough to push what was an otherwise unflappable angel into a well rather flappable state.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks as always everyone for joining me on this bat-shit crazy little journey :) If I have succeeded in entertaining you, I accept gratuity in the form of kudos, comments and bookmarks. I also, of course, accept concrit. If you feel comfortable leaving any of the above, it is always muchly appreciated.
> 
> See you in the next update, and as always, with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	18. Or, where Aziraphale throws hands.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The look which he now chanced Aziraphale with spoke of the ever truer nature of the demon's desires. Wanting to cross the room, rather than light on out into the waiting grip of the night. To purvey tender words and touches, to hold and to be held. To kiss and to take that kiss to depths so far uncharted, to surrender to the grip of that foundling thirst, fuelled by coals which burned ever hotter in the core of his being and stoked fire to the kindling heaped in upon it.
> 
> It was a fire what might burn apart the very essence of what it was that made Aziraphale so utterly desirable and appealing and beguiling to Crowley. His eternal temperance, his unsullied enthusiasm for what goodness was on offer in the world, his... for lack of a better word, innocence...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens is very much the property of person's other than myself. Please do not sue me. I'm just a poor little social worker trying to make her way through this cruel world with nothing more than a laptop and a dream. ...And, you know... a few other necessary things like toilet paper, running water and all the other benefits I am able to enjoy. Point being is that I would like to CONTINUE with the enjoying of them, so please be so kind as to not sue me and take my toilet paper away. Namaste :)
> 
> A/N: As always, thank you so much to everyone who is reading, kudo-ing and commenting. It's coming up to Christmas now, so the updates are naturally going to pause for a little while over the Christmas break, and then I plan to get right back into it! With any luck, I can get some work done on the ACTUAL new chapter in the new year (fingers crossed!) 
> 
> Anyway, to those of you reading for the first time, hope you enjoy the update and to those of you who have read it all before, sorry and thank you so much for your patience!

* * *

_**~Monday, April 8th - 2019~** _

_**A.Z Fell and Co - London Soho** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

Crowley wasn't at all sure what to make of it.

Having taken the corner on two wheels, he had rocketed up to the curb bordering the bookshop and beheld a sight he would never have put money on having _ever_ come to pass.

The Archangel Gabriel and the Seraphim Sandalphon, two of the utmost venerate and powerful representatives of Heaven, had but moments earlier, burst out through the antique double doors, arms shielding their heads as a veritable deluge of condiments, cutlery, plates, pots, pans and third editions rained down upon them like a vengeful fire from above. Hot English mustard exploded from its glass bottle as it bounced off of Gabriel's pristine coat, teacups shattered into shards around their feet and pages ripped free from books adhered themselves to whatever sticky mess they could lay claim to.

 ** _GET OOOUUUUUUTT!_** Came the booming sound of an angelic voice pealed directly from the cords of its temporarily unbridled Celestial spirit. It would not have been heard by any of the humans what loitered nearby but was thunderous to the preternatural ears of the nearby angels and demon. Crowley had never heard Aziraphale round off like this before. It was both awesome and terrifying _(and actually sort of arousing)_ in the same instance.

"Got quite a few more stones than what I remember." Sandalphon remarked, scraping what looked to be the remnants of coffee cake off of his shoulder and flicking it onto the ground. Unholy shit. Aziraphale HAD to have been in a mood if he'd gone and hurled leftover desert at the pair of smug bastards.

"Nothing for it. Persistence is a virtue, after all. Or _key,_ one or the other." Gabriel stated, straightening the lapels of his mustard stained coat. Neither of them had taken notice of the Bentley parked just offside of them. Nor of the demon what was currently circling its bonnet. "We must force him to listen. By guns blazing, if necessary. Come."

A lot of thoughts went through Crowley's head. They dimmed exorbitantly however, whence compared to the rage of emotion that currently flooded in and otherwise drowned his more often than not prevalent common sense.

The bookshop wasn't just Aziraphale's safe space. It was THEIR safe space. For over two hundred years it had been their sanctuary from most everything; the place they could retreat to and be completely and authentically themselves. Crowley had likely slept there and walked it's stuffy little halls much longer than he had his own fancy flat.

Seeing it burn had been more than enough. But now...now these two presumptuous bastards had the audacity to stroll on in, guns blazing so they said and rip the sacred, unspoken walls of Aziraphale's sanctuary from the angels hands.

They could take a lot from them. But they would not take _this_.

Crowley was _not_ a fighter. He wasn't in a corner. But his fangs were out nonetheless. He felt venom in his veins. And he prepared himself to bite.

A bite what came in the act of circling about so that he was now installed firmly between the two angels and the doors of the shop. A bite which came, much as a snakes, faster than the eye could track. A bite which was delivered in the form of an expensive snakeskin boot, lodging itself firmly into the waiting clutch of the Archangel Gabriel's 'pornography' region.

"Get back to Heaven, _sunshine._ " Crowley hissed, lips peeled back from his teeth as Gabriel collapsed sideways onto the ground, instantly regretting his decision to have applied male genitalia upon arriving on earth. It was a rather appropriate reflection as to how far ahead he had planned ( _or rather, how far he had NOT planned ahead)_ which saw Crowley the imminent recipient of a fully shouldered haymaker from Sandalphon, which knocked the demon into an ungainly pirouette and pitched his glasses clear off of his face.

He had copped most of the fist direct to his kisser, but it was still quite enough force to ring his bell. Enough so that he thought he was imagining the fist that zeroed in just shy of his right ear and connected with Sandalphon's pointed chin.

Aziraphale's strategy was for the most part defensive when it came to confrontation. But he'd had a terribly dreadful last couple of weeks. And now his home had been invaded, he'd feared his dearest most companion dead at the hands of demonic insurgents and, having stepped outside to ensure that the itinerant trespassers had indeed 'buggered off', witnessed said dear companion being struck with quite enough force it would be a blessing if it had not sheared any of his lovely teeth out of his head.

This was an angel pushed most assuredly to the edge of his considerable restraints. He had dealt with any such number of impertinences, inconveniences and otherwise malice intentions concerning his fellow angels, but to see one of them lash out at Crowley was where he most assuredly and incontestably drew the line.

It was a good solid left jab. It was all that was needed. The act of his having done it at all had shocked the designer trousers near off of Gabriel's legs. Or might have done, if his legs weren't currently pressed together so tightly it would have made the act of shirking his trousers in any way shape or form a distinct impossibility.

The punch had been enough to set Sandalphon back a few steps. Aziraphale kept his fists up, prepared for retaliation. Crowley had his fists up too. He wasn't doing a very good job of it. He was chesting up slightly off to the left of where the angels were currently standing and his thumb was inside of his fingers rather than the outside of them. He whirled them about in a manner reminiscent of what a drunk person might look like if they were attempting to milk a cow, head clearly spinning from the aforementioned strike Sandalphon had levelled upon him.

It was still very brave where Crowley was concerned and Aziraphale couldn't have imagined feeling any the more proud of him then he did in that very moment.

"How... _dare you_." He said at length, dropping his fists and straightening his vest with all the fussy austere of someone who hadn't just been hurling half of his walk in pantry out through the door of his shop. "It's not enough that you kidnap me, attempt to execute me by way of Hell fire, talk _down_ to me for over six thousand years but now you see fit to intrude upon what little I have that is ostensibly _mine_ and assault my dearest companion. I might have tolerated your contumelious ways in the past, but I am no longer your agent with which to treat as you see both fit and unfit to do so. This is my _home_." A darkness seemed to steal in around him, a sapping of the light which he otherwise might have so naturally exuded. "You will _never_ step foot in here again. _Never_ without my permission."

"Aziraphale..." Gabriel had finally managed to climb to his feet, leaning heavily on Sandalphon's shoulder; who was dabbing at a split in the corner of his lip with his handkerchief. Crowley swayed drunkenly over, parking himself in front of Aziraphale but wobbling about as though he were in fact six bottles in and the worse off for it. Aziraphale took him by the shoulders and eased him back so that he was by his shoulder, rather than dangling out there like a loose tongued fool with a hair trigger on his brain. "We... ooch... why, why, _WHY_ did the Almighty consider _these things_ a clever feature?" He actually spat off to the side, having coughed up something rather unsightly from the depths of his human body. Cleared his throat before continuing. "We need to talk. That's _all_."

"You got a funny way of asking nice for things. Don't go breakin' in to someone's house first... without knocking. Rule of thumb." Crowley said, swaying a finger about in the air in the somewhat vague direction which encompassed the presence of Gabriel and Sandalphon. Aziraphale took Crowley's hand out of the air and dropped it to his side, giving it a tender squeeze.

"You have nothing to say that would be of interest to me, Gabriel. Though if you feel it ever so important, you will find a contact number in the window. I suggest you write it down, learn to use a telephone and make use of it. You are not to come to the shop again unless invited and..." He raised Crowley's hand, gave a firm pat to the fingers what were looped now resolutely about his own. Unified in the face of their mutual enemies. "Be so kind as to inform Crowley's former associates that they are to keep well shot of him in the future. You would do well to heed the same advice. I suggest you take your leave now, gentleman. My hours of business are well over for the day and I have quite a bit of cleaning up to do."

Both Gabriel and Sandalphon looked very much as though they wished to argue the point. Together they were more than certainly a match for the likes of Aziraphale and Crowley _(particularly where Crowley was concerned)_ but the point of the whole matter was to get the pair of furloughed agents on side, not piss them off past the point of no return.

Neither of them had forgotten Aziraphale's resistance to Hell Fire, either. How he had spat it across the room at them, close enough to near discorporate their celestial eyebrows. He was clearly unpredictable at best and had learned quite a great deal of tricks from his demonic companion. Pushing the issue further was hardly likely to end well for either party.

"Very well." Gabriel said, attempting to maintain some composure whilst battling the irrepressible desire to keep a hand cupped about his much regretted private parts. "I will contact you by..."

"Telephone device." Sandalphon contributed, passing a finger over his lip and healing over the thick band of swelling which had appeared in the past few moments.

"Telephone device and we can... try again. Perhaps in a more _civilized_ fashion."

"Yes. Perhaps." Aziraphale said, sounding rather more salty than he could ever remember having done so in the past. He was vaguely aware of the fact that he still had a hold of Crowley's hand and the demon had not yet pulled away. It helped. The contact. It likely also helped with keeping Crowley standing up straight. He was still swaying like a slender reed caught in harsh crosswind.

Gabriel and Sandalphon departed by way of the right hand street; Gabriel just about bent in two as he went. Crowley took a few steps after them, letting go of Aziraphale's hand to do so. He shot a very smarmy look at their distant backs, wobbling about on his feet.

"Sure showed 'dem, eh?"

Aziraphale gave an indulgent chuckle. "Yes. Yes, we certainly did."

Crowley spun back around to face him, still weaving about like a dandelion stalk. "You all right? Dey didn't... do anything?"

"I'm fine, I'm not the one who got clocked in the face. You should really sit down before you fall and hit your head on the concrete."

"It's... I could hear all this yelling over the phone. Things getting thrown around." Crowley glanced about at the scattered mess currently taking up residence on the sidewalk outside of the book shop. He glanced back up at Aziraphale, looking slightly impressed. "That was all you?"

Aziraphale kept a very straight and civil face as he placed his hands into the small of his back with all the gentility of an upper class gentleman inviting a prestigious guest into the parlour.

"It's been a rather stressful last couple of weeks. I might have gotten a little... crabby."

Crowley chuckled, nearly tripping up over his own ankles as the world took to swaying about him. "Boy, when you cut loose angel, you sure don't do things in halves." His knees buckled a little and he pressed his fingertips to his temples as his vision swung like a pendulum. "Bless does that Sandalphon pack a punch."

"Of course. All angel's do. Our fists are powered by divine justice." Aziraphale scrunched his nose a little, reaching over to take Crowley by the inside elbow. "Come inside. I'll tend to your lip."

Crowley allowed himself to be guided inside of the shop like a little boy being taken to the toilet by his father. It was chaos most everywhere you looked. It seemed as though Aziraphale had forcefully ejected the entire contents of his kitchen out into the inside of the shop proper. Some bookcases had fallen down, likely in an attempt to squash the pair of trespassing angels and there were scattered pages, spilt liquids and food stuffs splattered hither and thither and yonder.

"You really went all out."

"I had a lot of... feelings to work through." Aziraphale remarked lightly. It made its point, however and Crowley felt the sharp end of it stick tightly into the edges of his heart. He went to say something, _what_ he wasn't quite sure but Aziraphale made no attempts to drive that point in any further and instead led Crowley over to perch on the settee, kneeling before him.

"You must have made good time getting across the city." He said, taking Crowley's chin lightly between his thumb and fingers and turning his head from side to side. The split to his lip was opened significantly wider than Sandalphon's had been but it would be an easy enough fix. He hesitated however, finding his eyes locked on the swelling, at the bleeding cut running through it much as the demon's pupils branched down the centre of his large eyes.

That very lip had been pressed between his own no less than a week earlier.

Aziraphale felt a stirring.

"Had five cop cars on my arse by the time I hit town. Had to bust all their computers and mess with a few memories so they couldn't track me down after. I lost 'em good enough. More scared I was gonna get here too late." Crowley paused, taking note of Aziraphale's staring. They made ever so brief eye contact, which Crowley broke by looking away; clearing his throat with embarrassment. "So um... had Hastur and Lord Beelzebub waiting for me by the car when I finished work."

"Yes. So I gathered." Aziraphale said, shaking himself out of his trance like state. And then, because Crowley looked at him with some confusion, added: "You must have dropped your phone what with all the excitement going on. I could hear Lord Beelzebub's voice. You were... fighting in the car? There were all these awful noises..."

"Yeah. Yeah, they dropped themselves into the passenger seat. Sorta like what you..." Crowley cleared his throat again, thinking better of making this particular allusion at the last moment. "Anyway. I got the passenger door opened and managed to kick them out."

Aziraphale's perfectly groomed brows graced the lines of his forehead. "I'm sorry, you... you kicked them _out_?"

"Into the side of a tree, yeah. Think I broke every bone in the bastards ribcage. Least I hope so."

"And then you came here and... launched your foot into Gabriel's..."

"Bollocks. _Yep_." Crowley said, popping the P. They were silent a moment, with Aziraphale focusing attention on the healing of Crowley's injury. When the angel's palm had crossed over his vision, Crowley was a little surprised to see Aziraphale now descending into peals of genuine mirth.

"All the things you might have done and _that_ was your first instinct!" He chortled, climbing to his feet and shucking off his dinner coat. He continued to chuckle as he made his way over to the coat rack, sliding on his grey cardigan instead and pulling out the sleeves so that they sat comfortably. "Kicking Lord Beelzebub into the side of a tree and driving your boot into the Archangel Gabriel's scrotum. You are most certainly a force to be reckoned with, Anthony. J Crowley."

"Says the angel who just about decimated his bookshop evicting two former work colleagues." Crowley said glancing about and pulling a face to see something which looked distinctly liked treacle leaking off one of the wall mounted lights. Aziraphale sighed, wringing his fingers together as he glanced anxiously about the trashed interior of the shop.

"I did get rather carried away, didn't I? I was... I was so angry with them and after hearing what was happening over the phone, I was terribly distressed about what was happening to you."

"I'll help you clean up." Crowley offered, climbing up out of his seat and rolling up the sleeves of his jacket. Aziraphale noticed that the demon was missing some buttons off of the front of his shirt, which as a result hung open almost all the way down to his navel.

"Did Lord Beelzebub do that?" He asked, gesturing vaguely towards both the shirt and the bare chest of which it was doing ever so poor a job of covering. He felt the slightest blush alight to his cheeks. It would seem Crowley hadn't put a singlet on underneath today, perhaps having eschewed it after getting changed out of his work uniform.

Crowley glanced down, taking stock of the state his shirt was currently in and gave an offhand sniff.

"Well, ya don't reckon I go around with it looking like this on purpose, do you? This ain't the seventies anymore, angel."

Aziraphale smiled, picking up some books off of the floor and sliding them back onto shelves at random. Apart from his First Editions, this was primarily the operating standard of A.Z. Fell's Rare Book Dealers and so he was not at all bothered by anything being out of order. He knew quite well how to find whatever it was that required finding.

"Well, in any event, I wouldn't want to be keeping you." He kept his eyes focused on the task currently at hand. Easier of course than getting his hopes up and much preferable to Crowley witnessing his anticipation. "I'm sure you have enough business of your own to be getting on with. Besides... it's quite true that I'm the one who made the mess."

Crowley shrugged. "Already outrun half the London police force and copped a smack from an angelic heavyweight for you. Hardly think a bit of light cleaning is going to make much of a difference." He made his way over to the double doors, peeking out to make good and certain no one was watching and then snapped his fingers at the mess currently adhered to on the ground.

Splintered glass shards formed back into bottles, complete with the condiments of which once called them home and zipped back through the air to reinstall themselves in Aziraphale's pantry and refrigerator alike. Books scooted back through the doors out of sight, pages reinserting themselves from where they had been forcibly ripped. Food reformed, reassembled and restacked itself. Plates became whole, cutlery flipped itself back into its drawers like a scene from _Beauty and the Beast_ and bookshelves rose up off the floor, bringing their collapsed paper and leather charges with them.

"Bippity-boppety _-boo_." Crowley said, flashing Aziraphale a wink as he waved his hands about merrily in the air; the gesturing demonstrably unrequired but more so as to amuse himself in the process of getting shit done. Aziraphale smiled, permitting himself the use of a little magic as well and before long, the bookshop was looking quite as cluttered, stuffy and homely as it ever had been. Even the treacle had been long since sheared off of the wall mounted light fixture and returned to the jar from whence it had been dramatically flung.

"Many hands do make for light work, so they say." Aziraphale said, taking one last look about to make good and certain that everything was in its proper place. He turned back to Crowley, who was sliding his jacket sleeves back down. It seemed a shame. Something about the way his forearms were exposed struck Aziraphale as being strangely... attractive. "Thank you."

And there he was smiling so beautifully and with such genuine gratitude that it sent Crowley's heart to racing. He didn't even have his glasses with which to shield his embarrassment; they'd been knocked off outside somewhere and he hadn't bothered with chasing after them whilst he was doing the cleaning.

"Ain't nothing." He said, flipping up his collar and staring uncomfortably off somewhere to the left; consumed by interest at the very little that was going on outside of Aziraphale's study window. He felt ever the more uncomfortable when his human stomach emitted a loud, unmistakeably hunger related grumble.

"Have you eaten much today?" Aziraphale asked, thinking it might have been one of those questions Crowley would single out as being particularly stupid. Sure enough:

"If I had, do you suppose my stomach might be making those sorts of noises? I'm either hungry, or something else rather alarming is going on."

"No need to get ornery. I was _going_ to offer to make you a sandwich."

"Really ought to get going." Crowley swayed a shoulder back towards the door, making very little concerted efforts in fact to extract himself from the situation. It was easier to stay away when he wasn't face to face with Aziraphale; feeling the warm pull of his presence, the draw of his kind smile. Once caught up in the wake of it all, he could feel himself being inexorably drawn in; such as a boat caught in the grip of a tidal pool.

It would be the smart thing to do. To leave. It would be better for the both of them.

"Please. I owe you for the clean up. Why don't you just stay long enough have a bite to eat and a drink? Then you can at least be on your way with a full belly."

Crowley didn't of course _need_ to eat. It was habit, more than anything. Besides, he had food at home. He certainly had more than enough alcohol. Alcohol enough to contend with most any bottle shop within a twenty mile radius.

But if he went home he himself would have to cook something. He supposed he could pick up dinner on the way but still... why turn down the offer of a sandwich? Aziraphale might have been a very mediocre cook, but he could pile up the components of which to create an especially delicious sandwich like no other. Plus, he kept the very best bottles of wine in the shop; those special vintages that he and Crowley collected throughout the years and had agreed to keep in the back room for those special occasions what required liquid libation of the more reposed variety.

He knew he was bandying about any number of reasons to accept the offer but none of them were anywhere near quite as true as that which was currently swaying him with greatest propensity still.

He _missed_ Aziraphale.

He _missed_ the bookshop.

He missed the _everything_ about them.

He wanted to stay. Even just a half hour longer.

"Got any good reds you don't mind cracking?"

Aziraphale smiled with pure radiant happiness, warmth flooding out the tight feeling what had held sway over his chest those past few months. "I've got that lovely bottle of Graham that you picked up some months back. I shouldn't mind 'cracking' that at all."

Crowley made himself at home in his usual perch in the corner settee. It had been two months since he had sat there but the material still adhered to the shape of his body as though it were in fact a lover embracing him after so long apart. He didn't sling his legs up and make himself especially comfortable. He knew that if he did, he likely wouldn't be getting up for some time and this was a risk he couldn't permit himself to take.

"What do you suppose they wanted?" Aziraphale called out from the kitchenette, taking out bread which had only just been returned to the breadbox and spreading on butter which had been magically scraped off of the wallpaper.

"Checking up on us, maybe. Not sure. Keep your wits about you though, yeah?" Crowley sniffed the air, pulling a face at the lingering hint of Gabriel and Sandalphon's mingled musk's. Too bad there was no supernatural deodorizer what could mute that cack out. "Can't be coming to your rescue all the time."

"No. No I suppose not." Aziraphale chuckled. He paused, midway through stacking a selection of salami and swiss cheese. Should he chance sharing just a little of what he was feeling? "It's..." He swallowed. Chanced it. "It's so lovely to hear your voice."

"… It's good to hear your voice too." Crowley admitted, something what was a little tender leaking into his tone. He didn't turn tail and charge out of the bookshop howling bloody murder, which Aziraphale considered a very good thing.

"Are you well?" He asked, tugging the cork out of the bottle of Graham and pouring a generous helping into two matching glasses.

"Well as can be keeping. Jeanie had her baby so I've been keeping busy hours at work." He glanced up as Aziraphale wandered out from the kitchenette, passing him over the small plate on which his stacked sandwich had been set and the glass of red. He returned briefly to fetch his own before settling down into his study chair, as per their tradition. "Don't think Hell ever kept me so busy as this job. It's been good though. Old Gretch keeps me on my toes."

"I'm sure she does." Aziraphale said, feeling ever so chuffed and relieved and tickled by the fact that they were, much as they had always been, back in the routine what was ever so effortlessly their own.

* * *

They talked for a while in this casual vein; touching on Crowley's work life, Aziraphale's business. Spent a good old while laughing over the rambunctious exchange between the angels and the demons and wondered just how embarrassed both parties must have felt to have been outdone by the likes of such reportedly substandard creatures as Aziraphale and Crowley.

They didn't speak about the kiss. It was starting to feel rather to Aziraphale as though it might very well have been a bizarre dream that he'd had. He was happy as such to go about pretending that it had been nothing more the concrete than this. For a while there it was as though... nothing at all had happened. They were, much as they had ever been. Relaxed and happy. It was wonderful. It was a relief.

It was... somehow disappointing.

"How about you?" Crowley eventually asked, as much of the conversation had been dancing about the borders of their work and the encroachment of their once respective agencies. "You doing okay?"

"Oh, yes." Aziraphale smiled, sipping from his now nearly depleted glass of red wine and tilting his head from side to side to form an agreeable gesture. "You know me. Just puttering along as I do."

"Keeping tickety-boo?"

Aziraphale laughed. "Quite." He paused a moment. Considered. The feelings what he had kept at bay over the past half hour popped to the surface like a balloon what had been held underwater by hands unseen and suddenly released. He couldn't understand why. Why it was happening but... but his lip had started to tremble. There was sadness welling up. And anger and... _resentment_. "Well… not quite. Not really. Not tickety-boo at all, really."

Crowley knew quite well the look what was springing into full bloom on the angel's face. It was telling enough that his smile had disappeared, for it was almost always a natural constant. "Aziraphale-"

"I heard you got into a fight." _Why, why? WHY was he doing this?! Things had been going so well, WHY was he ruining it?!_ "Not... tonight, not with that lot but with... with a human. While you were out drinking."

"Who have you been talking to?" Crowley asked, eyes narrowing suspiciously. Aziraphale barrelled on ahead, not paying the question but a jot of attention.

"It's not like you at all. You hate conflict. I just don't understand why you would go and do something like that. And with a human of all things!"

"One of the work girls has been onto you, haven't they? Who was it? Alice?"

"I'm not at liberty to betray my sources." Aziraphale said. "And _I_ was the one who got in contact with her."

It had taken him ages to learn how to use that Facebook messaging thing and he was rather the proud for having muddled it out without Crowley's assistance. Judging from the annoyed look on the demon's face however, this was not something that he was going to celebrating the achievements of anytime soon.

"Oh, so _stalking_ me now, are you? Great job you're doing at respecting my wishes."

"Because your wishes are _stupid!"_ Aziraphale yelled, shocking himself quite as much as he had indeed shocked Crowley. He had gotten to his feet at some point and was standing over the settee, feeling every raw inch of emotion he had otherwise sequestered, come spilling out as largely unfiltered as a creature such as Aziraphale was capable. "Here I am, day after day worried _sick_ about you and you won't touch base, you won't communicate with me. What else am I supposed to do? Just sit around waiting to find out that you're dead?!"

"Well whatever it is you choose to do, maybe don't go and involve my work colleagues in our personal affairs, _that_ might be a good start!" Crowley shot back, also on his feet and still clutching his glass of red, which he swigged from between exchanges. He tried to keep some space between them. It was clear that getting too close when their emotions were this high was a recipe for... well, any number of things. Things he wasn't sure they ought be introducing at this delicate juncture.

From a corner of Aziraphale's brain came a tiny, irresolute voice, screaming for him to shut this entire exchange down now before something was said which could not be unsaid. But he just couldn't seem to stop. There was something stronger at play here. Keeping all of this pain, frustration and anger cooped up inside of himself these past few months, coupled with the loneliness and the waking of unfamiliar tides of desire and longing, was altogether too much.

He had missed Crowley beyond the point of being able to tolerate it and resented him all the more for having brought him to a place such as this. To have brought them _both_ to this awful place.

"Well I would have hardly have felt the need if you had just bothered to get in contact with me! And just so as you know, your work colleagues are worried about you too." This certainly had something of an impact on Crowley, whose eyes widened ever so slightly; uncertainly. "They say you're drinking too much and going out all the time and… well the fighting!"

"Un-bunch your feathers, it was hardly a fight." Crowley said, taking another gulp from his wine. "I outran him eventually."

"I just think that given the change in circumstances… what with…" Aziraphale gestured vaguely towards the street, taking a few deep breaths so as to try to ease the flush of adrenaline out of his system. "- _that lot_ popping up again, that it would be prudent of us to work through whatever it is that we are going through and stand as a united front. Can you imagine the damage they can do if we were to remain divided like this?"

"We're not _divided_ , Aziraphale." Crowley said, softening. He had a look on his face, as though he might very well have liked to have crossed the room and brought himself closer. But he kept his distance. "Regardless of what other difficulties we might be experiencing, I will _always_ be in your corner. Hiding behind your back most likely, but I'll always _have_ your back, so to speak. Nothing changes in that regard. If you need me, I'll be here."

"I need you _now._ " Aziraphale murmured, his voice cracking with emotion. He couldn't quite believe that he had said such words out loud. He had never felt the more desperate however. He knew in that moment that he was about to go there. To stumble onto the thing they had both been avoiding discussing the whole while they'd sat there; playing happy families.

"And I need time to pull my head together. I'm not quite there yet. You're going too fast for _me_ , right now."

"Crowley… we… you kissed me."

Aziraphale knew right away that he had managed to say something wrong again. Crowley was giving him that sad, knowing look; the one which said that the angel was looking at things from a skewed angle and it was altogether much too expected.

"Yeah. _I_ kissed _you_. That's what I'm trying to get my head around at the moment." He swilled the last little snifter of wine about the base of the glass before knocking it back. He set the glass down upon the table bordering the settee and gave Aziraphale a small, supportive smile. "… Call me if the big wings start hassling you again."

"Crowley, please-"

The look which he now chanced Aziraphale with spoke of the ever truer nature of the demon's desires. Wanting to cross the room, rather than light on out into the waiting grip of the night. To purvey tender words and touches, to hold and to be held. To kiss and to take that kiss to depths so far uncharted, to surrender to the grip of that foundling thirst, fuelled by coals which burned ever hotter in the core of his being and stoked fire to the kindling heaped in upon it.

It was a fire what might burn apart the very essence of what it was that made Aziraphale so utterly desirable and appealing and beguiling to Crowley. His eternal temperance, his unsullied enthusiasm for what goodness was on offer in the world, his... for lack of a better word, innocence.

Crowley permitted himself but a moment longer to glance his eyes over Aziraphale's form; to commit it to memory. The angel stared back at him, lips pressed together so tightly they formed a line so straight and thin it might have resembled the slice of a sharp knife into the side of an apple. His fingers twined together. He wanted to go to Crowley, pull him in out of the doorway and bring him into the fold of his arms. Make him stay, work through it, _talk through it._

_Kiss him._

And those spikes, ever present stole up inside of him and slammed into his mind with such ferocity that it near knocked the fledgling formation of desire into a thousand tiny pieces.

_I can't. How could I possibly...?_

_I_ want _to. I want to_ feel _that again._

_That ever so sweet ache in my chest. Our palms upon one another's faces. Our breaths stealing in over one another's lips, burying deep within our lungs._

_The touch of his tongue..._

Aziraphale hesitated, struck numb beneath the violent, conflicting nature of his thoughts and his desires. Crowley, tired and frustrated, shook his head.

"You can't do it, can you? You can't even take that _one step."_

To Aziraphale it was like a cord had suddenly wrapped itself tight about his tongue to form a complicated knot. He wanted ever do desperately to _say_ something, to _do_ something. To take that step and prove to both Crowley and to himself that things _could_ change. And they could change for the better.

 _I_ want _this. Please don't go. Please don't leave me alone again. I'm dying more inside every day for being without you._

_You are what is most dear and precious to me. You are irreplaceable. I'm nothing without you._

_I will go with you. Anywhere you want to go. However fast. At whatever ridiculous, break neck speed you deem fit. You have been ever so patient and I_ know _that. I see that. And I'm sorry I made you wait so long, I'm sorry that I've hurt you, I'm sorry that I'm worse than a terrible fool, that I have been negligent and selfish and loyal to all the wrong person's and all the wrong causes and that it is you who has always forgiven me for that, even though you are a demon and I am supposed to have been the divine one._

 _I am_ not _ashamed of you. I am prouder of you than you will ever know. Every day I look at you and I am astonished and smitten and utterly undone by everything that you are and everything you do._

 _You are not just the great love of my life, you are the_ only _love of my life._

The words would not come.

He could not speak.

He could not move.

The fear gripped everything what was not the well from whence his emotions sprang, gripped them with iron claws and sank deep. Pain and sickness welled up in his chest, that failsafe going into survival mode once more.

* * *

**_Do not turn your back on Heaven_ **

**_There is but one true love and that love is to your God_ **

**_You will damn yourself_ **

**_He is Fallen_ **

**_He doesn't love you_ **

**_He wants you to fall_ **

**_He's deceiving you_ **

**_Tempting you_ **

**_It's what they do_ **

**_The apple_ **

**_Just like the apple_ **

* * *

Crowley could sense Aziraphale's struggle, though he hadn't a true understanding of just how painful and complex the degree of that struggle was. He wasn't feeling quite as charitable as he might ordinarily have felt where the angel was concerned, but simply all the more exhausted than he could remember being in a long time. Frustrated by it all, helpless in the face of Aziraphale's hereditary prison, he sighed; a sigh which eased out not even but a bare inch of what he was feeling inside and crossed over to the entryway.

"Take care of yourself, sweetheart." He said, giving the angel another small, all the sadder smile, as he pushed through the right hand door and allowed it to swing slowly shut behind him.

Aziraphale felt a scream welling up inside of him, one which he had heard before but had quite usually had the presence of mind to contain. Not this time. As the claws eased out of his body, contented it seemed in having prohibited his taking action when the demon was in the room, the locks which had slammed shut on each particular lid of Aziraphale's emotions snapped through and everything contained therein came pouring out like water loosed from an overflowing dam.

"Stupid, gormless-" He flung his glass, still not entirely empty and it smashed apart on the corner of the nearest bookshelf. "- _BASTARD!_ " He yelled, directed not at Crowley but rather at himself. Uncharacteristically unconcerned with the spattering of red wine now adding itself to the various stains having previously been left behind by Crowley on some of his less careful nights, Aziraphale sank down into his study chair, slamming the heel of his hand into his forehead.

"What is _wrong_ with you?!" He sobbed, tears streaming down his face. Why was he so insistent on having to ruin things for himself? Why couldn't he just act on what it was he was feeling? Grant both he and Crowley what it was that they both clearly wanted?

Tell him that he loved him. Loved him quite every bit as much as Crowley loved him.

Wanted him, just the same.

_Why?_

* * *

From outside, Crowley had heard the smash, had heard the yelling and it startled him quite as rightly as it ought to have done. He could never have envisioned Aziraphale doing such an uncouth thing as pitching a glass across the room.

He thought about going back inside. Thought better of it.

 _No,_ he decided, sliding on into the Bentley and using the key this time to get it started. He peeled away from the curb, dashing his fingers about his own eyes as he did. Knocking those awful, pointless and insulting tears away as best he could. _I can't be the one to take those steps forward on his behalf. Not anymore._

Aziraphale had been firmly rooted in place for so many thousands of years. Resistant, as was his nature, to any change that might threaten that to which his spirit was so ever acutely accustomed.

The only means forward, Crowley knew, was for Aziraphale now to move towards _him_.

To match his speed.

And meet him where he had been so patiently waiting for all those six thousand years, since the angel had held his hands between his own, sheltered him within the canopy of his wings and prayed for absolution on his behalf.

 _I have loved you so very long_ , Crowley thought, reaching into the compartment on his console where he kept his spare sets of sunglasses and sliding on another near matching pair to those he had lost earlier. _I can wait longer still. However long it might take for you to reach that place of peace, Aziraphale. I'll not push you there. I'll not rush you there. I'll simply wait for you there._

_Just take that one step forward._

_And the rest will follow._

Crowley spent ever so long during that car ride across town, trying to convince himself that it was but a matter of perhaps a little more time, so far as Aziraphale was concerned. Just a little more time.

He could not however shake the persistent and heart breaking thought, the one which he unintentionally felt ever the more convinced of by the moment, that time was not of the essence so far as this was concerned.

That for six thousand years, both he and Aziraphale had been riding completely different waves. He thought that their waves would eventually crash upon the shore of the same beach. It seemed more likely by the moment, however, that theirs were tides what were taking them in separate directions.

And Crowley felt himself stranded upon that distant shore, the one of which Aziraphale would never set foot, watching the waves carry the person he loved further adrift by the moment and who made no efforts to turn the keel and fight against the flow of the tides.

Just like in Heaven all those thousands of years ago, Aziraphale was letting his fingers slip slowly through his own. Directed still by the inert designs of the realm to which he no longer owed allegiance but what still held indisputable sway.

Aziraphale would not fight for Crowley.

Not in the way that truly mattered.

And _that_ was what even a demon found so very hard to forgive.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If you enjoyed, please feel free to share the whys, or if not, the why not's. You may kudos. Or you may send an offering of a small goat and a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc which retails at anything ranging from twenty-five pounds to thirty-five pounds. Well fancy, I am.
> 
> Thankyou as ever for joining me, my lovelies. Feel free to hook back in the next chapter, where Aziraphale gets ever the more drastic in his attempts to repair his relationship with Crowley, whilst their former associates reassess as to how they might set up a meeting with two very emotional beings who are just as likely to throw hands with them, as they are to... well, reel off and kick them in the nuts.
> 
> I will see you all again after the Christmas break, my dears! Wherever you are in the world, I hope you have yourselves a wonderful, safe and festive holiday season!!
> 
> Until then and with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	19. Or, in which Gabriel's human testicles can't catch a break.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You see our quandary." Gabriel said. "If we do not act and act swiftly, it is not a war what will be coming, but a penultimate nullification of most everything."
> 
> "Erasure." Beelzebub enunciated further; as though the fear presented by Gabriel's statement alone was not quite enough to send the gathering to quivering beneath their earthly garments. "A do over. Noah's ark for all creation."
> 
> "Only no Ark." Uriel stated. Gabriel gave a small shake of his head.
> 
> "No Ark."
> 
> No way out. No salvation for a one of them. God's plan was not, it seemed, to permit Her creations to resolve their age old disputes through war but to wipe it all clean like a cloth across a densely scralwed upon whiteboard and start fresh...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: Good Omens does not belong to me. Obviously. (Hurls scrap of paper into the river where it promptly bursts into flame).  
> A/N: Something I headcannon, at least so far as this story is concerned, is the way in which angels and demons spiritual abilities differentiates. I know that in the book we have a scene where Crowley breathes life into a dove that Aziraphale accidentally smothered in his sleeve but I prefer to think of angels being the ones in primary possession of intensive healing magic.
> 
> I imagine that demons may have the ability to heal smaller wounds but the healing is not quite as effective and doesn't always take. That's the vein that this story is going to follow, anyway.
> 
> And so, another update. Please feel free to grab a snack, your very favourite libation and take a read and I shall see on the flip side for a few additional thoughts.

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Monday, April 8th - 2019~** _

**_The Dog & Duck, London Soho _ **

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

A public house was hardly a distinguished locale in which to host a last minute angelic/demonic tête-à-tête. But it was certainly far the more suited whence compared to the likes of a video arcade, they had all agreed. Less of a chance this way of Hastur rendering his human body broken and worthless by otherwise repeated attempts to thrash an endless parade of teenagers, each more pus-flecked than the last, at the seductive sirens lure what was _Dance, Dance, Revolution._

Humans it would seem possessed an insatiable need to flock to public houses of an evening, Gabriel observed. To flitter amongst the accumulated odour of one another's constantly expunging sweat glands, to slaughter an endless parade of alcoholic beverages and speak at a progressively louder (and distinctively more the slurred) cadence as the night wore on. Combine this then with the strains of an ancient juke box which did not play its tunes so much as ooze them and the cracking of wooden cues striking the sides of billiard balls, it was far the simpler to hold a conversation without fear of being overheard. Even when squeezed into what might have been described as an 'intimate' corner booth, it proved difficult to catch what any of them might in fact have been saying.

Not that there was much to be said that first half hour. The majority of the collective sat simply in a sort of stunned silence, staring over the table at one Archangel Gabriel who looked very sore and sorry for himself and an ever so delicately bored as usual Lord of all Hell Beelzebub who was twirling a swizzle stick around the base of their honey malt whiskey.

"Well," they finally said, with the air of one whom had been mulling some more the interesting conclusions about in their head. "That went down like a lead balloon."

Gabriel, ever so intensely preoccupied by the pain radiating from the region betwixt his thighs, didn't quite catch this. "... I'm sorry... what?"

"I said, that went down like a - Oh forget it." Beelzebub tossed the swizzle stick onto the table churlishly and took a hefty swig from their drink. Across from them and squeezed in far the more intimately than the both of them preferred, Hastur was staring at Sandalphon's pinched expression from a distance far too close for the angel's comfort.

"He punched you? ... _That_ little powder puff?"

Sandalphon, healed upper lip just about forced into both nostrils, nodded in the very vague direction that the odorous demon currently (and offensively) occupied. Hastur in response, could not have looked more the thrilled than if Christmas had just gone and landed square in his stinky little lap.

"I think I'm starting to like that Aziraphale." He chuckled, sipping from his Rob Roy in a strangely dainty manner. He splashed a little of it onto his gloved hand as Sandalphon shifted uncomfortably on the far too small a bench space.

"Why am I stuck sitting next to you on a booth?" He tersely questioned, face directed away so that he was less the likely to incur the putrid waft of the demon's mouldy breath.

"What you think I _asked_ to be sat here? I'm quite as shot of you, don't you worry." Hastur shoved his hip sideways, forcing the angel over a couple of much needed inches. " And could you move over? Your arse is currently crossing the line."

"Well I can't very well control where it goes! If I move over any more I'll be on the floor."

"Fine by me."

"Sounds like we missed quite a party." Uriel remarked, raising her voice so as to be heard both above the din in the pub and the bickering of the angel and demon to her immediate left.

"A shame Crowley's boot didn't miss more of Gabriel's 'party'." Beelzebub made an offhand gesture towards Gabriel's crotch with the base of their glass, enough to cause the angel to flinch reflexively away. "Why did you feel the need to affix those unfortunate things anyway? Asking for trouble, that."

"I had to go and get a trouser fitting. Couldn't risk the attendant realizing something was awry." The archangel attempted to cross his legs and thought better of it.

"Well your own bloody fault then. Won't see me having much sympathy."

"I healed your broken ribs, I would expect something somewhat akin to sympathy for _that_ much at least."

"Why not just go ahead and heal your bloody love spuds then and stop griping about it?" Dagon suggested, attempting to peel the label from the side of her beer bottle with very limited success. Scraps of torn paper littered the table in front of her, which Uriel had started sectioning into neat little piles.

"This is hardly a discorporal issue. I am _not_ Aziraphale and I do not condone the whipping out of frivolous miracles left right and centre. I expect that this... in time... will alleviate." Gabriel shifted in his seat, hissing from between his teeth. Gosh darn did that demon have some ever so offensively pointy shoes. " _God I hope so_."

"I don't know if I would be asking your God for much of anything right now, Archangel." Beelzebub murmured, unable to keep the smallest of satisfied smiles from gracing their lips. Michael held a cautionary finger up to their Cupid's bow, casting a glance towards the door as they did.

"Careful. We don't want to go and attract the wrong attention."

They were quiet a moment, casting surreptitious eyes about the interior of the bar. The Vices and Virtues were all due to convene in London for whatever the reason and who was to say whether their appearances might have changed during their six thousand year retirement on earth. They might have been there even now, spattered amidst the gaggle of drunken humans; going about whatever business was required preceding the coming of the so called Apex. It was a contrarily sobering thought and one which encouraged the group to lean in closer still, in spite of some obvious reluctance to do so.

"It wasn't as though we were expecting they'd be pleased to see us." Uriel murmured in reference to Crowley and Aziraphale. She frowned as Dagon ripped free another longer shred from her label and deposited it dead centre on the table.

"I thought we might at least get a word in edgewise." Gabriel grumbled, trying to recall what it was that humans might have utilized so as to take the sting out of what was turning out to be a most indescribable and not at all otherwise dimming, pain.

"Never mind what Crowley got in edgewise." Beelzebub said with that not often seen little smile peeking out from behind the rim of their glass. Gabriel smacked his palm lightly to the table, eyes cast to the ceiling as his celestial patience wore ever closer to thin.

"Yes, _all right_ , it's all _very_ funny that the demon kicked me in the human testicles, can we _please_ move on?"

"You weren't able to get across our proposition?" Dagon managed to enquire amidst the rupture of snickering Gabriel's near outburst elicited from the demons. Sandalphon took a short sabbatical from his and Hastur's repeated attempts to usurp one another from their begrudgingly shared seat cushion to reply.

"Not a word of it. Aziraphale was clearly in no mood to listen." He glanced a finger to his lip, somewhat still in awe of the punch that the predominantly pacifistic angel had graced him with. It had been many thousands of years since Aziraphale had, so far as they were aware, engaged in combat of any kind. His form however had not diminished, it would seem.

"And Crowley waz ridiculous as per usual." Beelzebub took another sip from their drink, thinking back to the aforementioned ludicrous situation of less than an hour past. Crowley's legs windmilling around whilst the car continued inexplicably moving forwards. Their own subsequent ejection into the side of an elm and the then intolerable embarrassment of having to request an intensive healing from none other than Gabriel himself. "I know their little ears'd prick up if we managed to grab 'em for five minutes, but it's getting them to stand still long enough to talk that's proving tiresome." They scratched out some lines across the paperwork they had been forced to haul above ground; a considerable pile having formed by their elbow and piling so high it near graced the dangling legs of their blow fly hat. Hell was still without a leader and Beelzebub's workload was, in spite of the withdrawal of all demonic interference on earth, quite a great deal more than they could ever seem to get on top of.

"You take down that number from the bookshops window?" Gabriel asked Sandalphon who nodded and petted a hand to the breast pocket of his trench coat. "We'll try it tomorrow then. See if we can't get Aziraphale to cut the cheek long enough to have a civilized conversation."

"What about you?" Michael asked of the demon collective. "You can communicate through media devices can you not? Have you tried utilizing any of that to get a hold of Crowley?"

"Yes, _of course_." Dagon sniffed, looking annoyed for the impertinence of having even been asked so obvious a question. "No joy. He's draped a sheet or something over his televisions and every time I attempt to tap into one of his music devices he's either shut it down, set it on fire or smashed it with a golf club."

She had only known in fact that this was what Crowley had been doing because the demon had gleefully informed them of the fact right before the imminent crashing sounds had just about blown Dagon's eardrums out of her skull. If Crowley had ever bothered to put some of that solid backswing into actual combat he might not have been a poor investment as a front line operative. A shame he had the backbone of a bottom feeding invertebrate.

Gabriel raked his fingers back through his hair, sweat pricking across the worrisome lines of his forehead. "It's intolerable. We're running out of time. Doesn't the demon have a mobile telephone device? Have you tried that?"

"He never gave that number to any of us. Had us well convinced it was just for earth based business only." Beelzebub grimaced, struck another notation through a page with such contempt that the paper ripped and a line of ink bleed across the grain of the tabletop. "When I think of how much I let that little snot nose get away with-"

"You- you think _that's_ bad?!" Gabriel spluttered. "When I think about all the underhandedness Aziraphale got away with... Conducting evil deeds on behalf of... well, _your_ side all these years!" He shuddered just so as to imagine the inherent mishandling he was more than partly the responsible for. Six thousand years and the most he had done was issue Aziraphale with a strongly worded warning about cutting back on the amount of frivolous miracles he'd been conducting. If he had simply taken the time to have checked as to what _precisely_ the nature of those miracles were...

They had all allowed themselves to be played for fools; assuming that Aziraphale was much too glib and well meaning and moral to be led astray. Say what you will of Crowley, but he was clearly an astute and cunning breed of demon if he had managed to talk an angel about to playing the collective sum of Heaven's elite like the big, ignorant cello's they were.

"Never the mind that you had a demon whipping good deeds out of his back pocket like it was a novelty new card trick." Beelzebub whisked the completed document out off of the top of the stack and shifted it to the side. Only several thousand more to go. "Like I've already said, we've all gotten fucked over, we're all in the same boat up the same shit creek with toothpicks for oars and no wet wipes. The sooner we quit griping about the past and figure out what we're going to do regards the future-"

"Yes, speaking _of_ the future," Michael said, earning a look of reproach from Beelzebub for interrupting. "-the two of you have been the slightest bit circumspect regarding this. What exactly is so concerning that you feel we need to involve two expunged agents? Never the mind the rest of us."

In the days before the Fall, Gabriel and the Angel-What-Would-Become-Beelzebub had once been able to communicate a great deal of their thoughts and feelings in but the meeting of a simple gaze alone. Though the foundations had shifted dramatically, the core of this historic exchange continued to translate quite as fluidly as it had ever done and they shared a look now which might, between others, might very well have encompassed an entire spoken conversation. They agreed (strange though it still was for an angel and a demon to be largely simpatico on most anything) that it was appropriate to share with the others the depth of their unease and both sat up a little straighter in their seats.

"Something in the contract in particular." Gabriel said, with another visible wince. Shifting in his seat had not helped. "Besides the date on the cannister, of course."

"What exactly?"

"The wording used." Said Lord Beelzebub, putting down their pen and picking up their drink instead. "All. _All_ shall be judged."

They allowed silence in which to allow for this heavy and incontestably alarming nuance to sink in. Michael and Dagon in particular appeared to understand without further clarification as to just why this indelicate wording was particularly troubling but the others continued to look a little confused by it.

"There's no _context_ around this." Gabriel stressed. " _All_ could pertain to the entire human race-"

"- or it could pertain, as we suspect to _all_." Beelzebub concluded, swilling the last remaining snifter of golden liquid about the base of their glass. Not really focusing on it, but using the motion as a sort of soothing mechanism for their troubled thoughts. "Not just the souls of the human race but _all souls_ under God."

This explanation left no bones as to the reasons why Gabriel and Beelzebub were particularly worried. It seemed fitting that for the first time in recorded history, a number of demons and angels wore the very same expression of fear and confusion upon their human faces.

"You see our quandary." Gabriel said. "If we do not act and act swiftly, it is not a war what will be coming, but a penultimate nullification of most everything."

"Erasure." Beelzebub enunciated further; as though the fear presented by Gabriel's statement alone was not quite enough to send the gathering to quivering beneath their earthly garments. "A do over. Noah's ark for _all_ creation."

"Only no Ark." Uriel stated. Gabriel gave a small shake of his head.

"No Ark."

No way out. No salvation for a one of them. God's plan was not, it seemed, to permit Her creations to resolve their age old disputes through war but to wipe it all clean like a cloth across a densely scralwed upon whiteboard and start fresh.

She had done the same with the human race when She had no longer been able to abide Her disappointment in them. Perhaps She too had grown tired and wearisome of the rift between Her other children.

"... I do hope that you are wrong about all this." Michael said softly; their faith giving an ever so tremulous waver. It was thunderous. "Because if you're not, the fate of _everything_ is going to rest with us being able to convince a pair of wholly substandard, jaded ex-employees to act on our behalf in investigating a plan which has apparently been set in place since before time on earth began and potentially inciting the wrath of beings not only mightier than we, but that of the Lord God Herself."

Gabriel, lips pressed so tightly together they were just about non-existent, simply nodded, the severity of the situation all but having faded the worst of the pain from his attentions. Michael stiffened in their seat, the blood what might have resided in their human face all but draining visibly from their cheeks and down into their neck. They reached over, without even looking and plucked up Hastur's drink from within the loose clutch of the demons fingers.

"Hey!" Hastur protested, otherwise making no move so as to try and prevent the act from going forth. It was about as interesting as it was impertinent and both things were a sight not often affiliated with the likes of the celestial agents.

"I'm an angel, I'll buy you another one." Michael threw back the drink in one go, flinched at the strong, unfamiliar sensation of the alcohol hitting the rear of their throat. They swallowed, blinked heavily mascaraed eyes and sighed down into the now empty glass. "Mm. Starting to see why Aziraphale buys into all this." They waved the glass about. "How long until this stuff kicks in?"

"For you Wank-Wings? Probably about half a minute." Hastur chuckled. Gabriel dithered in his seat, mouth agog for what he had just witnessed.

"Please Michael. As if things weren't bad enough." His consternations were however made just a little more... flexible by the unspoken permission Michael had unintentionally bestowed. It would be... a relief, he thought to himself, to shut off some of that fierce anxiety what had been holding court in his chest these past few months. Not to mention shave off some of the pain from the injury he was currently nursing. He reached over to where Beelzebub had set their drink down, fingertips grazing the rim of the glass. "Maybe just a-"

The demons petite fist smashed hard and unhesitatingly into Gabriel's still tender groin, sending him toppling from his chair with a high pitched squeal that set all the local dogs to howling.

"Buy your own, you angelic skint flint." They said, snatching their drink back up and tossing what remained into their mouth with a sailor like proficiency. They had a headache, which was hardly improved by the added screech emitted by Hastur from the other side of the table, battering his hands wildly at Sandalphon who was holding up what looked like a perfume atomizer with a tasseled spray pump.

"The blessed Seraphim is _spritzing_ me with something!" Dramatically shrieked the Duke of Hell, coughing at the oversaturation of potent musk suddenly permeating the air.

"It's just _cologne_ and if I'm expected to sit here in your company for the next goodness only knows how long, I'd prefer you not get around smelling like a dead fish!"

"Now he just smells like a dead fish on its first date." Uriel remarked as Hastur and Sandalphon got to fighting over the atomizer like two children vying for possession of the very best toy truck in the Kindergarten sandpit. Beelzebub groaned, waving a hand to beckon the waitress over, wondering just how many drinks it was going to take before any of this became just a little less painful.

**~X~**

* * *

**~X~**

_**Crowley's flat - London Mayfair...** _

In a posh flat on the rather more affluent side of town, another demon was lying awake. His eyes were sore. He would hate to admit it, hate all the more for anyone to have witnessed it, but he had been crying.

He was awful tired and would have very much liked to have drifted off to sleep, but his thoughts were racing. He'd had so much to drink that you couldn't imagine anything could _possibly_ race in such an inebriated state; not without tangling up its own metaphorical legs and sending itself hurtling through the crash barrier. But Crowley's was a habitually busy brain and the evening preceding had done anything but instil restful thoughts.

The swirling, alcohol drenched fog of his mind was currently occupied by one thing in particular. Or rather one _word_ in particular.

The _N_ word.

_Nice._

It wasn't so much that nice was a trigger word for Crowley. More that it was... a four letter word.

Four letter words, he thought, were notorious for being some of the very worst that the English language had ever devised. Short and sharp enough to really cut in there and cut deep. Do some serious damage.

All the very worst words were four letter words. Crowley had come up with a great deal of them, in fact. _Pain, shit, fuck, cunt, feel, hurt, jinx, poxy, jape, dill_ and of course, _duck._ There were far more, of course. He had attempted listing them so as to suitably bore his brain into nodding off to sleep but that one little niggling word just kept on slinking right back in and jamming its grubby fingernail into his mind.

Nice. Now, _there_ was a word what really rubbed Crowley up the wrong way. It was a horrid, nasty, _demeaning_ little word. Aziraphale knew how he felt about it. And was still loose lipped concerning it.

Crowley could not remember a time, in all his long existence, when he had ever felt more insulted and tooth splinteringly infuriated with anyone.

Nice. _"You really are quite a nice..."_

 _"You don't get to say that,"_ Is what he had wanted to say, when he had shoved Aziraphale just about clear through the wall of the Once-Satanic-Nuns-Chattering-Order-of-Beryl-convent. Had _needed_ to say. _Should_ have said. _"You don't get to call me nice. You rejected me, no you_ negated _the possibility of me by virtue of the fact that I'm_ not _nice enough. I'm a demon and angels, as you so often remind me, can't play_ 'nice' _with demons._

_If they could, we wouldn't even be needing to have this exchange. We could have just... been. Whatever form this 'been' takes._

_From the moment we had exchanged those very first words of greeting upon the wall of Eden, our roles had been explicitly defined. I rose, ironically and you descended. All that mattered, it seemed, was from where we had originally hailed. Not the individual. It didn't matter that I had only been guilty of having too much cheek. Asking too many difficult questions and not taking 'no' for an answer. That I had been having a 'boring' afternoon. I'd been_ made _that way. Made to agitate, made to never feel entirely at ease. How was that my fault? It was just a particular that the Almighty chose to impart upon me, just as She saw fit to bestow you with that ever eternal warmth and incomprehensible patience._

 _And it was those particulars which held greater weight to you than the feelings we held in our hearts. The heavy press of Heaven's enormous burden upon your shoulders was all that you allowed yourself to feel. All that you permitted yourself to feel. Still. To this_ very _day._

_So no, angel. You don't get to call me nice. You don't get to just find a reason to say no to me and then remind me that no matter how close I get I will always be too far away. Too far away for you. Too fast. Too much never-quite-right. Always just out of reach of reconciliation._

You knew what you were doing when you said that. How could you not? We have long memories. I don't forget. You don't forget. It's precisely why we can injure each other so exquisitely. I know every chink in your armour and you mine. And you would think a demon would be more the likely the utilize this to its advantage.

 _But no. Not where you're concerned. You're too good, far too good for the likes of a world such as this. A spirit which held the shine, the worth, the beauty of an incandescent pearl. One that might never have come however from a grain of grit but from the most beautiful, holy and compassionate corner of God's will. It was uniquely and explicitly, a gift that was yours. What set you apart. What I could_ see _had set you apart._

Crowley might have made his attempts to move Aziraphale's way of thinking, to encourage him towards some manner of independent thought (he was certainly clever enough and independent enough to formulate some genuine gems of his own making) but he would never go so far as to truly Tempt the angel. He had respect enough to always be honest with Aziraphale. But truly, the idea of playing any sort of game with perhaps the singularly one true and genuine angel of Heaven, was tasteless even so far as he was concerned. And this from a demon who had been known to swerve towards the oft errant hedgehog which had the misfortune to wander onto the road when he had been out driving about.

It was not the demon who saw fit to play his games of malice. But the angel. Proving once more, as Crowley had long suspected, that it was the forces of Heaven, rather than Hell, that could twist the blade harder and deeper than any of the fell forces of Hell were ever capable.

_You sat in my car, looked at me with those eyes and you said 'You go too fast for me, Crowley'._

_I_ knew _what it meant. Between the lines. It meant I can't go where you want us to go. Because.' Because, because, be-fucking-cause..._

_Because you are right handed. Because I am ambidextrous. Because you like classical composers and I like twentieth century rock and roll. You are above and I am below. You are an angel and I am a demon. No matter how far and how hard I might stretch my hand, no matter what effort I might go to, you will always be just out of my reach._

_I fell and for that alone I am unforgivable._

And that hurt. That hurt a whole lot more than damnation ever did. To not be able to be with the person you had been smitten with, from the moment they held their wing out over your head to keep you out of the rain and told you ever so earnestly that they had given away a holy relic because a pair of humans had been 'having a bad day'. Had done something simply because he had felt that it was _the right thing to do._ Regardless of what Heaven might have otherwise directed. Aziraphale was his own person, who drew conclusions based on his own moral compass and whom had demonstrated, over the thousands of years, a willingness and a capacity to be _swayed._

That angel. That stupid, stupid angel with his stupid kind eyes and his stupid cruel and stubborn consternations. His being 'wedded' corporeal body and ethereal soul to a Heaven that had never deserved him. Not ever. Not the once.

Nice, you see, was a four letter word. Four letter words were traditionally offensive. Love was a four letter word and it was, in Crowley's opinion, the most offensive word of all.

Nice, it seemed, and Love, would never be set too far apart in his mind. One four letter word reminded him so unequivocally of the other four letter word that he was destined to never obtain. And the reminder of this was just as painful and as unneeded as was the rubbing of vinegar into a still bleeding wound. It hurt like hell. And you were most definitely asking for a fucking punch in the nose for your efforts.

_So, don't bring it up. Let it alone. Transgress your genuine angelic ignorance past the point of just delivering your sweet platitudes for want of what you have just witnessed and think, foolish principality. Think in how those that have transgressed might think and connect the dots so as to see how something so innocuous in your eyes, might be so destructive in mine._

_And don't bother with acting all surprised when I shove you through a wall for it._

* * *

Crowley had work first thing in the morning. But with such thoughts having turned the well trekked halls of his mind into their regular stomping ground, sleep was a long ways off.

More the pity for his house plants. Which had never looked the more vibrant, luscious and verdant. Nor the more petrified.

Crowley you see, had not been in a good mood the past two months.

And he was a demon who on his happiest of days, was capable still of reducing even the hardiest of Indian Banyan's to a mess of quivering leaves in the corner.

You might not have thought the squeaking of mattress springs to have roused such immeasurable terror but it was this sound that the metaphorical ears of the houseplants had grown particularly attuned to. For it was the sound which preceded an ever more sleep deprived, frustrated and gnarly Anthony J. Crowley stomping the flat in a restless fit, slogging back more and more itinerant mouthfuls of top shelf and peering, bleary eyed and calculating at each and every leaf adorning his plants; searching for just any excuse to hurl one of them out by the roots and straight off to the kitchen for execution.

There could never be found, in all the known corners of the world, more complete and incomparable supporters of Crowley and Aziraphale sorting out their mess than the demons persecuted house plants. They wished most ardently for it, in fact and waited and prayed in fervent hope for the pair of star crossed twits to drift back to one another's orbit, confess their love and ride off into the nebula of Alpha Centauri together with a picnic hamper and enough alcohol to cripple the likes of the Australian navy.

The sooner the better, they thought. In that minimalistic sort of way in which house plants could formulate a thought. If they could talk as well, they might very well have described the experience of living under the same roof as Crowley as tiptoeing on eggshells most days.

For the third time that hour, the mattress squeaked. A verdant hum echoed about the flat, shortly thereafter followed by a breeze so strong it near about whipped the expensive paintings from their hooks upon the wall.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I hope everyone had a very lovely, and very safe holiday season! Mine was a quiet, but much enjoyed family affair; which is perfect, as I'm not what you would call a particularly Christmasy person. At least not this year. Maybe next year I'll get back into the swing of things :)
> 
> If you enjoyed, please feel free to leave a comment, a kudos, or a whatnot. If you did not enjoy, or see room for improvement, feel free to concrit. I promise, I do not bite. If I did not take constructive criticism well, I would not be currently working hard on subdividing this story; which has honestly been the best thing where the Three Stages is concerned!
> 
> With any luck, I'll soon get more of these chapters trotted out and ever the closer to releasing the actual fresh content. See you in the next update, and, with all my usual infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	20. Or, in which Aziraphale thoroughly and incontestably compromises the Geneva convention.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not having said it was by no means negating the truth of it. Crowley knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he loved Aziraphale; a love which he had never experienced for any other being in this world or any of the others. And he knew that Aziraphale loved him; loved him by a means which transcended the boundaries of what was considered a natural angelic love, pertained for all living things. It was a love what was different, more fulsome, deeper and innately more greedy and wanting. It was not an angelic love but Aziraphale's and this was separate from that which was so incontestably inherent of his celestial nature.
> 
> Nothing was more the true, more the concrete, more uncomplicated than this. Everything else was just... technicalities.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> DISCLAIMER: You guys know why I still persist with writing these things? Because I am an archaic fanfiction dinosaur, who apparently missed the whole 'Pottergate' saga, and still believed that disclaimers were required at the beginning of every story. And now they're sort of just... force of habit. Seriously though; think I'm going to drop them after this, because apparently there's no longer a risk of being sued for not including these things. I always figured it was obvious, but there you go! Anway, don't own Good Omens nor its' characters, blah-de-effin'-all the norm-blah-dee-blah.
> 
> A/N: As always, cheers to you guys who are following the story, reading and providing kudos! It's always so appreciated and I really mean that! I don't have any fun facts to present to you guys right now, and I'm sorry but I did intend to post two chapters in one go but I got busy working on another fic of mine with my friend Stormus, so it's just this update for now. I'll try and have the other one out tomorrow afternoon though, promise! I know I need to get some traction on this, so apologies as usual for this dragging out longer than I intended!
> 
> Anyway, hope you guys enjoy, and I'll see you at the end of the chapter for a few quick words!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

**_The Grange Estate Nursing Home_ **

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

The following day, nursing a rather unfamiliar champagne based hangover, Alice made good her self-made promise of the earlier evening and bestowed a rather the firm smack to behind the ear of one Anthony J. Crowley.

She'd had to wait until their 9:00am break to do so and she'd almost gone back on it, such was the way that 'Anthony' was dragging his feet through the first two hours of his shift. He'd been forced to stay back late the previous evening, she'd been told and he was clearly far from a happy camper. Though she couldn't see his eyes, his face had a hangdog look about it; hardly detracting from his handsomeness but enough so that she could tell that he was tired and put out. And sad.

It had only been two months, but they had worked the majority of those two months in shared shifts and she felt she had gotten to know a little of his expressions by now. Usually when he was grumpy or annoyed, he would jut his lower lip out a bit and his voice would get all the more plummy; as though he were projecting his accent up over the bottom row of his teeth. That day there was none of that terseness. He just sort of 'hmmed' and 'Oh yes'd' his way through the shift; performing his duties with quite as much attention to detail as ever but a little more the distant than what might be considered the norm.

Perhaps it was a good thing he had been tasked predominantly with kitchen duty for the remainder of the day, Alice had thought. Though he was hardly being rude, acting distant could be just as detrimental so far as palliative care went and none of their charges would benefit from his being distracted. At least the carting of boxes and putting together of meals required minimal animation.

Alice chose her time to strike well. Following the residents breakfast, she and 'Anthony' put some dirty linen in to wash and then drifted on down to the break room for a cuppa. Another two members of staff kept an eye on things whilst the two early starters were permitted to duck on out for a break.

Crowley immediately made for his familial roost on top of the decorative bench, lighting up a cigarette and alternating between puffing and sipping from his coffee. At some stage he took out his phone and started flicking through the gallery; looking at pictures of Aziraphale. Knowing it wasn't going to be helping matters but rather not caring at this stage what was considered to be helpful or not.

Seeing him the previous night had been hard. The whole exchange had been difficult and sad and troubling.

But it had been wonderful too. Wonderful to be close to him again. To feel that warmth. To see that smile.

He loved the pictures with Aziraphale smiling. Didn't do it justice, though. Not the same as being there. Seeing it. Feeling the light of it directed right on through you, nestling into you.

The cuff just about knocked his glasses clear off of his face and he flung a hand up over them at the last moment, shoving them back up close to his eyes.

"Get on the phone and call your mister right now, you stubborn git!" Alice was snapping, circling back round to plonk herself onto her customary perch by the back door and lighting up her own cigarette. She looked about as angry as a cat what had been yanked out of a sack by its tail; claws ready to lash to whatever bare arm might have come close.

"Ah, so it was _you_." Crowley said, straightening his glasses and pressing the button on the side of the phone to put the screen to sleep. He hadn't much of a doubt as to who it was that Aziraphale had been in contact with (he'd all but fessed up the previous night anyhow) but he was wondering still how long Alice was planning to keep quiet about the matter. She'd gone the entire morning without saying boo, which wasn't like her at all. Clearly, she had been waiting for the perfect moment in which to add her two cents worth.

"Yeah it was me. You know, you are the absolute _worst_." She jabbed her cigarette at him, her hazel eyes narrowed with genuine irritation. Yep. Most definitely an expression of one whom had been swayed over to the side of Aziraphale simply by virtue of having been caught directly in the tractor pull of the angel's glowing personality. "Your Alex is like the sweetest, most _adorable_ guy in the world and he's worrying himself sick over you, so get on the phone right now and sort your shit out!"

"Look, I'm sorry you got dragged into all this because it really _isn't your business_." Crowley made a point of firmly emphasizing those last few words, in a voice he felt conveyed just enough danger so as to shut the remainder of the conversation down.

It might have worked with the likes of certain, more tremulous person's who were not in fact Alice. Alice who had grown up with a father who hurled fists instead of indecorously barbed phrases replete with delicate emphasis. Anthony J. Crowley, so far as she was concerned, posed about as much risk to her as a tangerine with the peel off.

"Oh I think it's _very much_ my business when one of my friends is getting hurt."

"Who said we were friends?" Crowley said, meaning to be a little nasty. Alice picked up a small pebble from close by and pegged it into his leg, hard enough to make it sting.

"I meant Alex, you sour little fruit!"

Crowley pulled a face, rubbing at the spot on his calf in which the pebble had struck him. "You only met Alex last night; what you're already friends?!"

Why he expressed disbelief with such a concept he wasn't quite sure. Aziraphale was the type who would make friends with most anyone, so long as they weren't a demon from hell.

He had even once permitted the strange, unmedicated and very much unwashed gentleman who lived in the park and who chased people proclaiming himself to be 'King of the Salamanders' to refer to him as a friend one time. Something with which Crowley had taken spectacular offense, given it had taken him over six thousand years (time of which he dedicated wholesomely to the act of bathing, self-medicating and not chasing people insisting that they recognize his sovereignty over a collective genus of cold blooded reptile) to receive the same recognition.

Should it really be so strange that in one night he had gone and gotten chummy with one of Crowley's work colleagues? Give it a week and they'd probably be off to the farmer's market together, squeezing cantaloupe and pulling faces at the man with gingivitis handing out cheese samples.

"I was friends with him from the moment I sat down! He _paid_ for dinner, _he pulled my seat out for me_! He walked me to the taxi, _paid_ for it and _held open the door while I got in_! He didn't even look up my skirt, and I can pretty much guarantee I was enough in the bag that he would have gotten a good look without invitation!" She ignored the face which Crowley was pulling, likely effaced purely to have some fun at her expense. "He gave me a hug! It was like… the _best_ hug I've ever had! He's got the cutest… he's just the cutest…" She looked quite as though she were about to explode, such was the inability of her brain to reconcile the irrepressible charm and sweet rancour that was one Aziraphale. Crowley reminded himself that he'd had quite a bit more experience dealing with the pure unfiltered presence of the angel than most. Aziraphale could be a rather large overdose of the feel goods to those who had no tolerance for it. "Do you know what I wouldn't give for a man who would do all those things for me? A man who didn't expect you to put out afterwards?"

"Well, you're in luck so far as Azira-... _Alex_ is concerned." Crowley muttered, correcting himself at the last moment. From the sounds of things, Aziraphale had invited Alice out to dinner somewhere to get the scoop as to what had been going on.

Crowley had to admit that this in itself was every bit quite of what he expected of the angel. He was hardly the type to just call someone up or message them and simply demand information in exchange for nothing. The guilt alone would be enough to drive him to any decadent avenue of expense, just so as he felt good and certain that he had repaid whatever debt he felt himself to have accrued in making such a request.

"I'm telling you now, if you don't sort this mess out, I'll have a sex change and bloody well marry him myself!" Alice was saying, shaking her cigarette with such vigour that the entire burning ash just about flew out from the tip. Crowley, obviously unthreatened by the very implausible notion of Aziraphale setting up domestic bliss with a human, shrugged and took another drag from his own fag.

"Fine, marry him. Have fun with that. He'd probably say yes just to make you happy." He couldn't help but smile at this one. He could just see it now; Aziraphale standing at the front of a church somewhere, eyes bugging from his head as Alice swept down the isle in a fluffy, mutton sleeve dress, wondering just how in the Hell he'd managed to land himself in this fine mess and likely banking on Crowley to come hotfooting in the back door with some last minute plan to remedy the situation. He probably wouldn't even voice a hint of a protest if that intervention were to come in the form of another redirected bomb, even if it were to take out the attending priest, assorted guests, altar boys and the like.

Alice took the slight smile what had formed on Crowley's face as some manner of invitation to get a bit more sentimental with the whole thing. She climbed up off of the stoop, dusted a hand over her rear to clear the dust and grime from her uniform and went and perched on the bench proper. She twisted her arm about to smack her palm to Crowley's calf.

"Listen, in all seriousness I know it isn't any of my business but… you know, life's short." She said, to which the demon gave an ironic little 'Hmph' as he took another drag from his smoke. "And it's hard to find someone you really care about. Someone who really cares about you. I've tried. I'm thirty-seven and I'm _still_ trying. So when you find someone that you share all that stuff with, that real genuine awesome connection, you really gotta hold onto it, boyo. Who knows what could happen tomorrow? He might get hit by a car."

Crowley sat up a bit straighter at this one. Knowing Aziraphale, it was a miracle in and of itself that such a thing _hadn't_ yet come to pass. He was notoriously dreadful at looking both ways before crossing the street. And he must of course have been more distracted than usual. Crowley was often the one who prevented such things from happening. The dopey angel had almost gotten himself skittled by a garbage truck once. A _garbage truck_. Wasn't hard to hear one of those coming, for... someone's sake.

"Just… think about it, yeah mate?" Alice rested her aching temple against her fist; giving Crowley a smile which she could only hope in some way conveyed her bizarre feelings of urgency concerning the matter. "He loves you _so much_. And you love him. Whatever else is going in, isn't that the most important thing? Doesn't that see out all the other bullshit?"

_All the other bullshit..._

It was quite a bit of bullshit to be getting on with, Crowley thought. It was complicated, far more than this well meaning young human could possibly get their head around...

But Crowley wasn't doing such a good job of getting his head around it either.

Two months, so many weeks and he hadn't yet an answer as to how any of this was supposed to work. _If_ it was supposed to work.

He was shutting Aziraphale out and to what end? What good was it ultimately accomplishing? Singularly they might very well have been clever creatures apiece but together they were most often able to put that mental prowess to greater effect and muddle on through whatever it was required the working out.

 _Yes_ , it was complicated. _Yes_ it was frightening. And _yes_ , Aziraphale was the one who needed to pull his socks up and push himself that bit further. To take that step and break on out of whatever fences corralled his feelings and desires.

But Aziraphale _wanted_ to talk. He _wanted_ to try and to work through it all.

Crowley had known Aziraphale to have been cruel in the past. To have said cruel things. But it was he what was being cruel now. He who was pushing Aziraphale to a desperate place, who was hurting him, denying him and playing some awful game at his expense.

It was confusing. It was complicated. But there was one thing which _wasn't_.

They loved one another.

Not having said it was by no means negating the truth of it. Crowley knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he loved Aziraphale; a love which he had never experienced for any other being in this world or any of the others. And he knew that Aziraphale loved him; loved him by a means which transcended the boundaries of what was considered a natural angelic love, pertained for all living things. It was a love what was different, more fulsome, deeper and innately more _greedy_ and _wanting_. It was not an angelic love but _Aziraphale's_ and this was separate from that which was so incontestably inherent of his celestial nature.

Nothing was more the true, more the concrete, more uncomplicated than this. Everything else was just... technicalities.

They could help one another through it. Crowley need not abandon Aziraphale to this. This journey which was likely the more terrifying than any on which the angel had ever had reason to embark.

Crowley could _explain_ it, at the very least. Explain his thoughts, his fears, his feelings on the matter. So that Aziraphale could reach some peace with this much and make an informed decision as to how he wished to proceed once in possession of the knowledge. This was fair. And Crowley rather felt he had been very unfair to someone he cared for deeply. Who deserved indisputably better.

He gave a sigh, which was but a winsome breath what underpinned the assiduous nature of his busy thoughts and took another long draw from his cigarette. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll… I'll give him a call after I finish my shift."

He thought this was quite enough of a concession to get him off of the hook, but Alice surprised him once more in all but shoving her finger through his hip; jabbing at where the corner of his phone was poking out from his pocket.

"No you never. You were looking at pictures of him when I came out here. Don't be so stubborn and call him. Let him know you wanna talk. Imagine him home all day feeling like shit just waiting to hear from you. Don't be so bloody cruel."

"All right, all right. I'll call him now. _Jesus._ " Crowley winced slightly at the word, tugging the phone out from his pocket and tapping on the screen to unlock it. "You are some next level emotional manipulator you are."

"I'm a woman. We're good for that." She grinned, climbing up off of the bench and pinching her fingers to Crowley's cheek, which earned her an annoyed ' _gerroff'_ in response. "Ooh that's such a relief. And not just because I want you to bring Alex along to every staff do we have from here on out."

"You just want him for more hugs." Crowley said, opening up his contacts and hovering his thumb over Aziraphale's name. "Or to pay for dinner, more like."

"It's mainly the hugs. The lobster and expensive champagne wasn't a bad touch either." Crowley flinched as he received yet another punch to the arm. "He buys you _champagne!_! You are seriously _such_ a bastard! I mean the shit I would put up with in exchange for a champagne supper. I seriously don't know what is _wrong_ with you!"

"I'd go hoarse if I attempted to list the ways." Crowley said, flapping his fingers towards the door to indicate that he wanted some privacy with which to make the call. Alice gave a thumbs up, ground out her cigarette and deposited the butt into the large glass coffee container they kept nearby for this very purpose. Feeling unusually nervous himself, Crowley bum lit another smoke for himself, grinding out the remaining nub of the first before then drawing deeply upon the filter of the second.

He hit Aziraphale's name on screen and put the phone to his ear. His fingers trembled a little as he brought the cigarette back up to his mouth. He was calling the shop, thinking this was more the likely the phone which Aziraphale was going to answer.

When the call rang out, he tried the mobile and was a little annoyed for it to go to message bank. Hopefully it was nothing. Aziraphale likely ducking out for breakfast or some such nonsense and leaving the mobile on his desk, as was his airheaded norm.

Aziraphale's message bank was ever so charming though and it did actually bring a smile to Crowley's lips to hear it.

 _"Hello."_ (That same overly warm and virtuous tone as ever). _"Ever so sorry I'm not available to take your call. I imagine that this is Crowley, as you are the only one who has the number for this mobile device and the only one whom I could ever imagine might ever contact me as such. Do leave a message at the tone, my dear and I shall strive forthwith to return your call at the earliest possible convenience. If it is however an emergency, or if there is a change of plans per some dinner arrangements we might have made, please do not hesitate to contact me at the shop. Pip-pip."_

Pip-pip? Crowley never could quite abstain from rolling his eyes at this one. Sometimes he suspected that Aziraphale enjoyed going through life being a walking, talking embodiment of every known old-fashioned English stereotype what might have existed pre the twentieth century. It was a wonder he didn't go about with a monocle, a cane and a snuff box; pinching a good helping on busy street corners and sneezing bodaciously into the faces of otherwise innocent passers-by, whilst exclaiming _'Pon my word!_ ' to no one in particular.

The beep sounded on the phone and Crowley yanked himself out of his, as always, much distracting thoughts and tried to string together a message which might have sounded just the slightest bit more in control than what it was he was currently feeling.

"Yeah, um... hi." Well, off to a great start already. "Hope everything's ok. You know... after all that with... that lot, yesterday." He took a deep breath. Told himself to stop playing silly buggers. "Look, I uh... I just wanted to say, I'm sorry about... freezing you out these past couple of months. I haven't dealt with any of this at all well, and... I'm ready to uh, to talk. If _you_ are. I mean, I can understand if you don't want to but uh... if you do, well... I might pop by the bookshop after my shift, if that's okay. I mean, let me know if it's not. Just give me a call. Send me a message. If I don't hear from you, I'll assume that means it's okay to swing by. I'll bring dinner if you like, whatever." This was dragging out, as was what remained of Crowley's break, so he decided to cut it short. By doing something he thought to be very brave on his part. "I've got to get back to work but hopefully I'll see you tonight. Be well. ...love you."

He hung up quickly, pressed the phone against his forehead and prayed to whatever it was that disenchanted demons prayed to these days that it hadn't been too much. It was what he had been feeling, nothing surer, but he hoped it wasn't about to go and send Aziraphale into a tailspin.

Little did Crowley realize however, that it was not Aziraphale whom was about to be knocked for six but he himself what was about to be caught entirely off guard.

* * *

Crowley had been right about two things. Aziraphale had in fact left his mobile plugged in to the charger on his study desk. And he _had_ ducked out. Just not for breakfast.

At the time of Crowley's call, Aziraphale was in fact walking through the front doors of the Grange Estate Nursing home. He had been on a bus for the better part of the morning. And, prior to the dawn breaking of that particular morning, Aziraphale had been much busier than an angel had any right to be during hours of which he might have much preferred to be conducting his sleeping.

Sleep had proven quite impossible however, given what had transpired between himself and Crowley. Such were the strength of his feelings concerning said exchange, that he hadn't even wasted time on the mere thought of sleep; never mind the attempting of it. He had instead put his restless mind and body to work on far the more productive and important matters.

He was tired, _yes_. But tired in ways of which extended far beyond that of his physical body; one which did not in fact require sleep but still insisted on the exchange rate regardless.

Aziraphale was weary in ways what didn't even compare. He was heartbroken and fed up and furious with himself and with Heaven for the role it continued to play in what was to be this, the rest of his life.

He missed Crowley. He missed him and he loved him and he wanted to move forwards with him into whatever it was what might be awaiting them. He wanted to take that first step. To fight through these ridiculous, cruel constraints Heaven had instilled within him.

It was possible. He had done it with the apple, after all. Eating was no different, not when it came down to it.

It was simply a means of persistence.

Aziraphale had been feeling more than a little desperate the previous evening. After he had cleaned up the mess he had made and picked up every stray sliver of glass he could find, a thought came to him. It wasn't a nice thought, hardly at all an angelic one. But appropriately enough, given the context, one of which Aziraphale considered without any of those common constraints otherwise factoring in. He was desperate after all and desperate times as they say abide the conducting of ever the more desperate measures.

Less than a half hour after Crowley had left, Aziraphale found himself on the computer. He was researching the Grange Estate Nursing home. In particular, their staffing policy. Having done so, the once angel of the Eastern Gate, started doing something for which perhaps Crowley himself might have chastised him; expending a great deal of magical energy in the doling out of self-indulgent miracles left right and centre.

The first little spell he weaved was in tapping into the staff roster for the Grange Estate nursing home for the following day. With a nudge of magical energy, he directed the spreadsheet out from his own printer and scanned the listing of names. Crowley was on the early shift, commencing at 7:00am. Aziraphale searched then for another name, one who was due to start at 9:00am.

He took that name and whirled it around in his head. Created another miracle. A _terrible_ one. One he might very well have once conducted at the behest of Crowley, in keeping with their once established 'Arrangement'.

Aziraphale was creating a stomach bug.

He was creating a stomach bug and then sinking that stomach bug into the body of the Grange Estate's rostered cook. He was putting a great deal of virulent energy into this particular bug; prompting it to come on hard and fast and to last no less than twenty-four hours. It would come with a very great deal of vomiting, uncontrollable diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever and would result, much to his later consternation, in the affected cook having to be taken into the emergency department by his equally as repulsed wife. Aziraphale had been taking no chances in wanting this particular gentlemen out of the way.

The cooks who prepared the meals for the residents of the Grange Estate, Aziraphale had discovered, were not in fact hired directly by the estate itself. They were outsourced from another company; whose pool of cooks were available to work most anywhere what was required.

It was very on board, of course; with extensive background checks, proof of experience, qualifications and the like. Exempting one individual, of which all these aforementioned factors were entirely fabricated and who was claiming but a wealth of experience in an area that the actual creature in question was notoriously substandard regards; exempting perhaps where the making of a delicious sandwich was otherwise concerned.

It would seem that Alexander Fell, in addition to running a Rare Bookstore, spent some hours moonlighting as a sous chef.

No one at the hiring agency would contest it, either. So far as they were concerned, Alexander Fell had been on the books for many years and came highly recommended with incontestable customer satisfaction. Aziraphale had been required to fiddle about with a few memories of selective individuals here and there in order to sell this untruth; something which he was historically and vocally not on board with, but something he now gave very little hoots about. _Desperate times._

Alexander Fell, it further transpired, was the only cook available to work on short notice. He took the call himself, first thing in the morning. Advised that he was more than happy to close up shop for the day and to pop on by to work the five hour shift at the Grange Estate Nursing Home. _No, it wouldn't be a bother at all. Happy to help out! Shall be on my way in two shakes of a jolly lambs tail!_

He first made Crowley a sandwich, remembering the demon's growling stomach from the night before and thinking it would serve as something of a peace offering. He had a sneaking suspicion that Crowley was just as likely to throw the sandwich back in his face as he was to actually accept it, but progress was never made in taking the easy way out. Something Aziraphale was fast learning, perhaps six thousand or so years later to the party then he really ought to have been.

The sandwich further served as a symbolic gesture. Crowley didn't need to eat, after all. But the care and effort what went into personally preparing something was a fact that the demon never took for granted and Aziraphale hoped would further strengthen the point that he was going to be making.

He had spent most of the night wording himself up; writing things down, reading them out and then scratching out, scribbling in and rearranging what might be better phrased and whatnot. He had forgotten quite nearly all of it come the morning and none of the crumpled up notes littered about him on the floor were of any use. It was much like trying to fit together a jigsaw puzzle, only to find that the pieces of two other entirely separate jigsaws had been thrown into the mix. He decided in the end that it was much more meaningful to simply speak from the heart; no matter how much grief his angelic thumbscrews wrought him in the process.

Aziraphale wrapped up the pastrami, cheese and pickle sandwich ever so carefully, placing it then in a sealed Tupperware container. He set it in his lap throughout his early morning bus trip; trying his best to focus on the days newspaper but finding himself reading the same sentence over and over again. He was much too anxious to successfully distract himself. An article about an unexplained violent outbreak in some isolated village in Italy caught his eye but then it too faded out of importance as other more strenuous thoughts marched their way back in to claim monopoly of his attention.

He gave up eventually, leaving the paper on the seat beside him and simply staring out the window; feet jittering across the floor as if to deter a crowd of ants from otherwise gathering by his shoes.

It was a long drive by car and longer still by bus, but Aziraphale did in fact arrive right on 8:50am. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved to spot Crowley's Bentley parked in the staff carpark or if the sight of it only worsened his already considerable nerves. He took a deep breath in of the cool morning air; let it fill his lungs fully before staggering it out. His heart still took to racing like a frightened rabbits, but there was simply nothing for it but to push forward.

He attempted to soothe himself with the thought that by tonight, all this terrible mess would be behind them. Goodness knows what shape that prospective 'tonight' otherwise took but it wouldn't do to think on it too much, or he'd never get his shaking body through the door.

By the time Crowley was grinding out his second cigarette, Aziraphale was stepping in through the automatic doors of the Grange Estate Nursing home reception. There was a young woman installed behind the front desk, bearing the countenance of one whom was already far the more bored with life than someone in their mid-twenties really had any right to be.

Her eyes widened curiously at Aziraphale as he entered and she sat up straight in her seat as though the will to live had been suddenly pumped into her by IV drip.

"Good morning, my dear." Aziraphale said, with ever the same warm smile he trotted out like a prized show dog. He passed a manila folder over the desk, where the receptionist, eyes still locked on him purposefully, tugged it towards her by use of perfectly rounded, likely pressed on boysenberry nails. "I am filling in for the cook here today, who I understand is feeling a little under the weather."

The receptionist's brows rose up so as to form near perfect umbrellas above her eyes. _If the hair hadn't been enough of a giveaway, the tell-tale proper manner of speech simply sold it._

"I _knew_ it! When the agency called back, I thought they said they were sending out an Alexander Fell! Then I just second guessed myself. Thought my ear had heard it wrong, what with Anthony's waffling on every five minutes-" She caught herself, pressing her fingertips to her lips as though to force whatever words were about to come spilling out back in. After mustering some self-control, she reached one of those hands across the high rise of the desk and offered it to Aziraphale. "Sorry, darl. I'm Carrol." She peered back over the top of her desk, adjusting her lower end designer glasses and tilting her head to the side in that way a lot of women seemed to be adopting when it came to Aziraphale lately. "You... you're Anthony's... _partner_ , right?"

Aziraphale did his very best to keep the stiffness out of his smile. He had gone into this knowing full well that this was the impression what Crowley had left his work colleagues with. And it was an impression Aziraphale would do his utmost to sustain. Further proof that he was, of course, not the least ashamed of Crowley. Or of their relationship.

"I suppose I must be." He said, straightening out his lapels and hitching the traitorous corners of his lips up into the apples of his cheeks. Carrol gave another sympathetic cock of her head, smiling in such a way it made Aziraphale wonder as to whether Crowley had been telling tales about him having some terminal disease. She then plucked up the manila folder, making her way out from behind the desk on heels which made an almost racheting sound as she went.

"Well... not sure how you managed it, but rest assured I'm in your corner. Come on, I'll take you through." She zippered out a card from a clip on her belt and passed it over the security sensor leading into the complex proper. The double glass doors behind her rolled open and she gestured for Aziraphale to follow her inside. "Anthony's on kitchen duty today, so all the better, huh? Honestly, can I just say that man has been a _real_ god send. We were all so sorry to hear about the problems the two of you have been having. If you don't mind my saying so."

"Oh, so he's been talking about our... disagreement then. Wonderful." Aziraphale murmured, not paying quite as much attention to the young lady as he might otherwise have done. He was in through the doors now and getting closer by the moment to doing that which he had been setting himself up all night to get done. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears like the wash of the distant sea.

"You'd be so proud of him. All the old girls absolutely love him." Carrol turned, mid-swish down the hall and said in a sort of dramatic offside. " _Most of the young ones too, actually._ You'd best hold on to him tight or someone'll yank him right on out from under you!"

This one Aziraphale did catch. "Under me?" He blustered, face reddening as an image, quite unprecedented shot through his brain and just about rendered his legs useless on the spot.

"- they were bringing the groceries in, so I wouldn't be surprised if we round up on him-" Carrol clapped her hands together sharply. "Ha. There he is."

Aziraphale glanced off to the left where Carrol was pointing. Crowley had emerged from a doorway which opened up into what was clearly a generous kitchen area, calling out over his shoulder to someone as he went. Aziraphale couldn't make out whatever it was he might have been saying; the rush of blood in his ears had suddenly become much too loud and drowned out most everything in its wake.

"Oi!" Carrol's voice was apparently just high pitched enough to cut through it. She made a very curt, imperial gesture towards Crowley who turned, spotted Aziraphale at her back and froze in place as though roots had sprouted from the soles of his shoes. "Anthony! You'll never guess who's filling in for Paul today!"

Aziraphale somehow managed to keep on smiling through the panic which roiled about through every chamber of his body. Crowley hadn't yet moved from by the doorway, though his bottom lip was hanging open in a way what made him look, at best, a little to the side of simple. Carrol, unaware of, or perhaps uncaring concerns the tightening cord of tension forming between the two men shaped creatures, gave a perky clap of her hands as though everything were right with the world and she were directly responsible for having implemented it.

"Well, I need to be getting back to the front desk." She shook a finger over her shoulder at Crowley as she swished off, skirt chasing about her ankles like a loyal pet. "Don't you go sneaking off for a quickie in one of the supply closets when you're still on the clock."

"I'll leave it 'til my scheduled break, how's that?" Crowley managed to sputter; with all the dignity otherwise espoused by a garden a hose when it has been sitting unused in the backyard for a while. Satisfied that libidinous activity was not on the cards, Carrol flashed an ok sign in the air above her head before click-clacking her way around the corner.

Aziraphale and Crowley were left staring at one another; neither entirely certain as to how to proceed now that they were face to face. Crowley, in spite of having just called Aziraphale and requesting that they meet up to talk, felt strangely annoyed with being rounded up on in his workplace. He hadn't an opportunity yet to prepare himself.

His breath still stank of the cigarettes he'd been smoking. He'd forgotten to put cologne on before coming to work. It was, at least in his mind, the equivalent of someone rocking up to your house uninvited and you still had conditioner in your hair.

Crowley _detested_ being caught off guard. It was one of those things what simply put him in a bad mood right off the cuff. And so, instead of saying all those lovely things he had been meaning to say, he did something very typically Crowley-ish and indulged that otherwise petty annoyance.

"What the Heaven are _you_ doing here?" He snapped, trying in a not so very subtle way to glance over his work uniform for any stains or smears of urine, faeces or vomit present. His hair was probably a mess. He had no gum. _Why didn't he just starting keeping gum in his fucking pockets?!_

Strangely enough, Crowley's temper merely instilled a sense of calm in Aziraphale. He was used to the demon's mood swings after six thousand years of dealing with them and it was a constant that he was quite practiced at rolling with.

"Bringing you lunch, for one. I made you a sandwich." He handed the plastic container to Crowley who stared at it as though Aziraphale had handed him something so patently ludicrous as a bucket of sloth droppings.

"They _do_ feed me here, you know. I hardly needed you to bring me a bloody sandwich." He nonetheless took the plastic container, never so proud as to turn down food when offered. He'd seen the likes of far too many starving children throughout the ages to ever morally abide wastage. And it had been, he begrudgingly acknowledged, a kind thought.

"Well you were starving yesterday, excuse me for noticing. You're _welcome_ by the way. I'm also -"

Aziraphale was interrupted by the somewhat predictable and fortuitous timing of the woman he surmised to be the site manager. He name badge read 'Rita' and she was carrying a bundle of white clothing, distinctly as crinkly as Crowley's had appeared on his very first day of work.

"You must be Alex, I presume?"

"Indeed I am." Aziraphale replied, taking the proffered bundle of clothing with a munificent smile what seemed to soften even the hard edge shellac layered upon the borders of Rita's heart. Trying her utmost to keep from being charmed, she jerked a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the interior office.

"Got some paperwork for you to sign before you get started but first things first. Anthony." She snapped her fingers at the demon in such an authoritarian manner that it made Aziraphale chuckle to himself. No pushover, it would seem. "He's your partner, so I hear. Show him where he can get changed, where the break room is and all that, while I get things organized."

Crowley had clearly not put two and two together yet. He continued to stare at the bundle of clothing in Aziraphale's hands as though wondering just why on earth he had been passed the blessed things for.

"Why?"

"Now, please" Rita said, her tone stating in no uncertain terms that she would bust Crowley's spine over her knee like an uncooked noodle just as soon as look at him. She headed back towards the office, whilst Aziraphale gave Crowley a small, supportive smile to which he received a wholly dumbfounded look in return. Aziraphale fancied he hadn't witnessed such shock adorn the demon's features since that time of their first meeting upon the wall of the Garden of Eden.

"You applied to work here? _Seriously?_ "

"I'm filling in for the cook." Aziraphale said, effacing a self-important tone for whatever the reason as he picked at one of the crunchy corners of the uniform. Crowley's brows had axed in so low over his eyes that they had all but disappeared behind the lenses of his glasses.

" _... You can't cook!_ "

"Technicalities, if anything." Aziraphale permitted just a hint of the frustration he had been battling throughout the long night to creep out and spread through the lines of his face. "Well, I couldn't see any other way to get you to talk to me."

" _Wuh-wha..._?" Crowley was quite obviously blindsided; gaping like a fish that had just been hurled from the water and tossed haphazardly onto the docks. He wasn't sure what to think. He wasn't sure in fact _when_ he might be able to think. "Wh-why the cook of all people? How did you even manage to _do_ that? What happened to the cook?" His eyes widened to such a startling degree that they could be clearly glimpsed from behind his glasses. "Did you _kill_ the cook?"

His tone was strangely gleeful; as though hoping that Aziraphale had in fact committed some uncharacteristic act of carnage by braining the cook over the head with a thick enough book and rolling his expired body up in a Persian rug.

"No I _didn't_ kill the cook!" Aziraphale said, with the look of someone who might have in fact gotten away with murder if not for their own guilt spectacularly dropping them in it. "Of course not. ... I just arranged for a little... stomach bug..."

"You what?"

"A stomach bug!" Aziraphale groaned, more the guilt ridden for the fact that Crowley was now grinning in that ever so beautiful way he was prone to doing when skulduggery was afoot. It meant, of course, that the demon in him was very, very pleased for something the unpleasant which had occurred, perhaps even more so on account of it being the angel who had in fact perpetrated said nefarious act. "Oh, do wipe that smug smirk off of your face. It wasn't as though I gave him diphtheria. He'll recover in a day or so. I just needed an in, was all."

"Oh, that is a special level of _messed up_. Real next level." Crowley chuckled happily, a fact which was clearly grinding on Aziraphale's nerves. "Miracling a stomach bug into the belly of an innocent man and quintessentially negating the plight of the elderly so as to meet your own needs. Sort of... demony, really. Not sure whether to be impressed or not..." He tilted his head curiously, counting out the moments mentally before then asking: "You check your messages on your way here?"

Aziraphale continued to look all the more guilt stricken by the moment; which was something of a prodigious feat. His was a feeling of shame fast approaching Olympian level standards, if in fact marinating in guilt was a considered to be a competitive sport. It might have been him and a collective spattering of Catholics neck and neck all the way to the finish line. Aziraphale might well have had them beat, quite simply as a result of his never being able to absolve himself through any acts of confession he had ever attempted.

"Left the phone on the charger again..." He mumbled, to which Crowley rolled his eyes (unseen by Aziraphale but worth doing all the same) and puffed air towards the ceiling like a whale clearing its blowhole. Only with slightly less watery back spray.

"Some bloody good you'll be when the collective forces of Heaven and Hell come a knocking. How am I supposed to reach you then? Carrier pigeon? Smoke signals?" Crowley signed, jamming his hands into his pockets and flicking his head off towards the hall. "Come on then, I'll show you around."

"Crowley, I-" Aziraphale got no further than this before the demon turned on his protective slip covered heels and sauntered off. He sighed, taking a deep breath and plucking up some patience from the near eternal celestial arsenal at his disposal before following along with the armful of crunchy (rather itchy feeling, really) clothes.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: It's amazing what Aziraphale is capable of, when self-interest takes over ;) 
> 
> Thanks both for reading and supporting the story, everyone! If you have any questions or thoughts about the fic, please don't be afraid to both share and ask! I'll see you for the next update, which should, all things going according to plan, be very soon!
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	21. Or, in which Aziraphale takes that first bite.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For Aziraphale this was every inch the conundrum that he had been expecting. The words embarrassed him somewhat, for he was a modest creature and such abrupt, passionate exchanges were hardly in keeping with the decorum he had thus maintained over his thousands of years on earth. But what welled up inside of him, more the ravenous and emphatic still was that very feeling he had surrendered to in the time of the garden. That feeling of being desperately thirsty, and starving, of a tongue resting cracked and dry and unsated between the cradles of his teeth.
> 
> Staring at a fruit, forbidden and lovely and all too suited to meet each and every one of those long denied but ever so perilously aching needs...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As per the norm, thanks to all you guys who are supporting by reading, leaving kudos or commenting on the fic. Thanks also to those of you who are supporting the offshoots; I appreciate that as well!
> 
> Here is the update I intended to post alongside the previous chapter. I'm going to attempt to get a few more of these out in chunks (aka: A few 'chapters' at a time) but I am just a bit stuck for time at the moment. I'm feeling a bit burned out and just working so as to try and motivate myself.
> 
> Random Good Omens-ervation of the day: In the novel and the script book, Hastur instructs Crowley to sign the documentation (in accepting the passing over of the antichrist) with his ACTUAL demonic name, not the name by which he asks to be referred. Which means that Crowley once possessed an 'angelic' title and another true 'demonic' title, which we never hear about in either the novel or the show. It would be interesting to know just what demon he was supposed to have been, eh?
> 
> Anyhoo, some more reading for you, dear... uh, readers. This update continues directly on from where it left off last chapter. Hope that you enjoy and I shall see you on the flip side!

**~X~**

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_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

**_The Grange Estate Nursing Home _ **

"This is the break room." Crowley narrated, opening a door up to show a small room, painted dark blue and sporting a wall mounted kitchen isle, a round table hemmed with a number of well worn chairs and an equally set upon couch shoved up against the far wall. "This is where the staff all make tea and coffee and talk at length about their love lives. Sometimes in graphic detail." Crowley crossed the room to where a refrigerator sat humming about the doldrums of life and opened the door, placing the container with the sandwich inside of it. "I've spent a lot of time lately in there. Talking about you."

"So I gather."

"Everyone agrees that it's your fault, by the way." Crowley supposed that this was hardly likely to be the case after Alice put her dinner experience with Aziraphale across to the rest of the staff. He could envision the collective of women being firmly in the angel's corner after hearing tales of his generosity concerning expensive wine, lobster and the not-glancing-up-of-skirts. Apparently this was the sort of behaviour what went a long way with winning a human woman over.

"That _what's_ my fault, exactly?" Aziraphale remarked, quite unable to keep a frown off of his face at this.

"Oh, they think we're broken up now. That tends to be what happens when human co-dependents haven't seen each other for two months. Living separately, you know."

Aziraphale momentarily spluttered, finding this to just be a little unfair an assessment. "Well, I hardly see how the matter is entirely _my_ fault! I wasn't the one wanting to keep my distance, if you recall that was _your_ request, not mine-"

"Moving on." Crowley breezed past, perhaps a little haughtily Aziraphale observed and kicked a door directly opposite the break room. It opened up to a small outdoor sitting area, presided over by a vine wreathed gazebo, in which a few aged nests clung obstinately to their roosts. "Out here's the gazebo. Staff go there to smoke on break. I've been smoking a bit too lately." He gave Aziraphale a long look over the lenses of his glasses, daring the angel to have a go at him. Aziraphale, much to his better nature, didn't bite. He did not go to all that effort to be here, simply to make matters the worse.

"If that's what you wish to do." He said fairly, which was a response Crowley hadn't appeared to have been banking on. Turning his head away with a slightly disappointed huff, he marched on, gesturing at some fire equipment and laminated signs tacked to the pock marked, likely asbestos riddled walls.

"Here's our fire safety section. In the event of a fire, the carpark is our marshal station. Follow the instructions of the warden. They're the one who gets to wear the spiffy white hard hat. We will need to wheel the oldies out so they don't burn to death. The warden will instruct us on which sections we need to help evacuate."

He went to move on. Aziraphale had anticipated that this was the momentum the demon would continue to maintain if he didn't execute a little forward thinking here and now. He got between Crowley and wherever it was he meant to go strutting off towards next and held out his palm in a universally recognized gesture to hit the brakes.

"Could you please just stop. Just _stop_. We need to talk. Please, this is... this is ridiculous." He gestured towards the break room; the room he felt he was likely to get just a little of the privacy he so desperately required at this stage. "Just five minutes. Just to put my side across. I believe I'm owed that much."

If one were to ask Crowley why he was making this all so very difficult for Aziraphale, the demon would likely answer that he himself hadn't the foggiest. It was true that he wanted to talk, quite as much as did Aziraphale and wished ever as earnestly for a kind resolution to what had been a terribly unkind couple of months. Why he was being stubborn, he couldn't say. Only perhaps that he was terribly frightened on the inside and that by moving forwards without pause he made it ever the more difficult for that fear to catch up to him.

There was no evading it now. Whatever happened next would happen. The answer, whether it was what he wanted to hear or what he was ever so desperately afraid to hear, was about to be delivered. He steeled himself, feeling much as he imagined a small child might when they are being called out of class to receive a scheduled inoculation. Sloped his way to the break room; the door of which Aziraphale was holding open for him and drifted over to rest against the countertop. He hit the plastic lever on the jug to heat the water; for someone was likely to be wanting coffee at any given moment and then crossed his arms, surveying the angel whom had settled himself in a safe sort of no-man's land beside the old table.

"Right. What do you want to say?"

They had beaten about the bush to such a degree the previous night that the metaphorical shrubbery was likely sans but a stitch of a leaf by this stage. Aziraphale was very tired and he had gone to a great deal of trouble in order to bring this all about. The time for splitting hairs was well and truly over.

"Well, what do you _suppose_ I want to say? We need to talk about the-" He realized that he was near about yelling and lowered his voice. Ashamed he might not have been, but that hardly meant that just anyone had a right to hear about their personal business. "- _the kiss, of course!_ "

Crowley's heart gave a kick in his chest what might have put an unborn infant to shame. This was it. If they talked about it, there would be no going back. And though he was a demon who was accustomed to having turned tail throughout most of his six millennia on earth, Crowley was, in that moment, convinced beyond a sliver of a doubt that this was a situation from which he _could not_ and _would not_ run.

He wanted to. The very idea that in but a few moments Aziraphale might very well be lost to him forever was enough to make him feel deathly ill. He thought he might actually vomit, the shakes were so bad. That was precisely why he was keeping his arms crossed. To hide the trembling of his fingers in the crooks of his elbows.

"If you've just dragged me in here to ask me to pretend as though the whole thing never happened," He said, swallowing in what was in fact, a very dry mouth. Acknowledging this would be to set it in stone. A concession of its tangibility. An invitation to address this largely avoided thing they had been dancing on the borders of all these... months? Years? _Centuries?_ "-then don't go and bother. I'm not going to play silly bastards just so as you can go back to sticking your head in the sand."

"That's _not_ what I was going to ask." Aziraphale sighed, pressing his hands together and holding the steeple shape they formed up against his lips. He closed his eyes a moment, marshalling his own fluttering courage. Fighting back those awful, benighted barbs that kept trying to stab, stab, _STAB_ into his mind. Block him at every turn he attempted to take with his emotions. "What I wanted to ask... well, to get some context regards- _clarify_ , really was... your um. Your thoughts, your intentions." So far as Aziraphale could tell, Crowley was staring back at him with a look what was vaguely imperious and bored. It was off-putting, though unbeknownst to him, a very fragile farce. "I... I would assume that... given that you... that _we_ kissed that... that it would mean that you... view our relationship as... _being_...?"

Crowley couldn't keep the nervous scoff from popping out at this. Like a tickle in his throat he had been unable to prevent from turning into a cough. "What? We _really_ doing this?"

"Doing what?" Aziraphale asked, confused.

"You know _what._ _Classifying it._ Like it needs classifying. I know how _I_ feel. You know how _you_ feel."

"Yes, but I rather don't know what it is that _you_ feel." Aziraphale felt that this was a very important distinction to make. "Not entirely. And I don't think that it hurts for us to spell things out. Not if it helps to avoid all this stuff and nonsense in the future."

"You want me to spell it out. Fine. I'll spell it out." Crowley crossed to the fridge, remembering something he had glimpsed earlier when placing his sandwich inside. One of the girls had brought in a cupcake for her morning tea. It was one of those ridiculously overly ornamental things, something which might very well see pride of place in a display window on a rotating pedestal. It was perched on a plate, a plate which dimmed in woeful comparison to the flamboyant baked good settled astride it. Crowley took it from the shelf on which it had been placed and set it down on the table in front of Aziraphale. He gestured to it, as though this in itself was quite enough of an explanation required. "There."

Aziraphale stared at the cupcake, understandably at a loss as to just how he was intended to proceed with the limited amount of direction he had been offered.

"... I can't eat somebody else's cupcake!" He finally blurted out, assuming at long last that for whatever the reason Crowley was trying to make a point about the apple from that day back in the garden; using a cupcake in place of once forbidden fruit. It wasn't a bad interpretation and somewhat on the money, but it was not precisely what Crowley had in mind.

"I'm not _giving_ you the cupcake, I'm using the cupcake to make a point!" Crowley said, frustrated. He pointed to the pretentious little cake; sitting pretty on its plate as though it were the culinary based equivalent of the Duchess of Kent astride a swan shaped pontoon. "Look at this pompous thing. All the swirly pink icing, the little flowers, the silver dots, the colours. All this effort put into something you're just going to grind into a sweet tasting paste between your teeth. Why do you think humans go to all the effort, eh?"

"Because a good meal is eaten quite as much with your eyes as it is with your lips." Aziraphale gave the otherwise intended automatic response what Crowley had been anticipating. The angel blanched a little upon reaching the end of his recitation, aware that he had walked himself straight into the... well, not so much trap but onto the path which Crowley had otherwise readily paved for him.

"Precisely." Said the clever demon, with an ever more clever smile. "We don't _need_ to eat, Aziraphale. We don't _need_ to drink or sleep for that matter. We do these things because we enjoy them. We could enjoy looking at the aesthetic technique which goes into making a cupcake and never have a real, inherent need to pick it up and take a bite out of it. We could stand here until the cupcake turns to ash and we still won't have starved to death." He lowered his glasses a little, just so as to ensure that his gaze was met. He would not risk taking them off in his workplace but he knew it was ever so important for the angel to see his eyes. "So why do we eat, Aziraphale?"

"Such as you said; because it feels good to do so. It's enjoyable. It makes our time here enjoyable. It's..." The angel gave an ever so slight quirk of his shoulder. There he was; traipsing on down that path, never the wiser to where it might lead but tarrying forth all the same on the sagacious words of an ever more clever demon. "-an experience."

"Yeah. It's an _experience_. A sensation. We're stuck in this world; we might as well experience what it has to offer." He flicked a finger towards the cupcake. "Well... we're... you, I... both of us... we're... cupcakes."

"Oh, I would _never_ wear that shade of pink." Aziraphale sort of joked, meaning only to lighten the tone a little. It seemed a very strange and entirely far too appropriate thing for him to have been the one to come here with some big plan and for Crowley to all but hijack it. "And you're hardly frilly and sweet."

"Don't be clever. I'm trying to make a point." Crowley said, plainly unimpressed by the angels attempt, in his mind, to subvert the trajectory of what was already an incredibly difficult and frightening conversation. He cleared his throat, breaking eye contact for just a moment, because he could see that the sharpness of his tone had hurt Aziraphale. "Look, I uh... let me just uh... try and get this across, eh?" He cleared his throat again. It was thickening. His voice was catching. _Oh shit._ "For six thousand years, I've been... looking at you. Metaphorically perched on a plate in front of me. There's no actual... _need_ for me to have ever picked you up and taken a bite out of you. But in not having done so, I feel as though I have... missed out on something of the full experience of _knowing_ you. To look is one thing. To taste is another. You need _both_ with which to have the _full experience_."

Aziraphale considered then just what these words meant in conjunction to the moment that the two of them had shared in the Bentley. A kiss, in so few words was an attainment. Much like the biting of the apple. To accrue the very thing that you wanted between your lips was an ageless one.

It was one which Aziraphale understood far too well.

It had always been his weakness.

"I... I see your point." He murmured, a flush lighting itself to the rise of his cheeks. Crowley might have been phrasing himself rather the more elegantly at that moment, but his face was the evidence otherwise of his reticence and he too had gone a rather soft, fetching shade of pink. It was more the obvious around his throat and he was aware of the heat, glancing his palm off of it before rubbing his fingers up behind his neck. Rolling his head so unnecessarily he was starting to resemble a puppet on a loose string.

"I think what it boils down to, is that this is quintessentially no different to that apple all those years ago. You asked me _why_ I was eating it." He glanced back towards Aziraphale, knowing that this was a tremendous ask; to cast one's mind back so many thousands of years. He hadn't forgotten it, true but that shouldn't have suggested such a moment was ingrained upon the lines of Aziraphale's memories with much the same permanence. "You remember what I said in return?"

"Because you wanted it." Aziraphale replied, without hesitance and it was quite enough to make Crowley feel a little weaker in the knees. He hadn't forgotten. All those years and he _still remembered._

"That's right. And I want _you_ , just the same as I wanted that apple." He shelved his embarrassment, for it was far too late to attempt to protect himself now and let something else instead creep in. That self-same desire what took control of him that night in the Bentley. Which had _insisted_ on the angel's lips. "To both look at you and to sink my teeth into you."

For Aziraphale this was every inch the conundrum that he had been expecting. The words embarrassed him somewhat, for he was a modest creature and such abrupt, passionate exchanges were hardly in keeping with the decorum he had thus maintained over his thousands of years on earth. But what welled up inside of him, more the ravenous and emphatic still was that very feeling he had surrendered to in the time of the garden. That feeling of being desperately thirsty, and starving, of a tongue resting cracked and dry and unsated between the cradles of his teeth.

Staring at a fruit, forbidden and lovely and all too suited to meet each and every one of those long denied but ever so perilously aching needs.

"Crowley, please..." He murmured, flustered as was to be expected, though not entirely out of embarrassment, which was _not at all_ to be expected. The demon couldn't be certain of such a thing, as these were emotions that the angel was not practiced in and therefore quite unfamiliar to the person what knew him best of all to comfortably interpret.

"You're the one who wanted it spelt out. Let me spell it out." He needed to lay it all on the line now. Go for broke. And not just because his boss would soon get to wondering just where in the Heaven the two of them had sauntered off to. "Conversation is all well and good but there are times where I just want to be... closer to you. Closer than a gaze or a... smile. I worry that you feel such a thing is sinful, that it somehow denounces the inherent value of what it is that we share. But we are well beyond the point where a primitive means of conveying a more simple expression of feeling applies, angel."

Aziraphale wasn't quite certain when he would be able to speak. He felt ever so vulnerable, so touched and so... _relieved_. Crowley was saying all those very things what Aziraphale himself had been feeling, had been wondering. Feelings so strong, so replete with love, with passion that simply sitting beside one another, sharing a glancing eye contact was so grossly inadequate, so infuriatingly stunted that it _ached_. They felt the same way; their struggle was a shared one, much as it had always been.

"If anything we're just... finding a means by which to attain more from what it is that we feel for each other." Crowley was saying and his words made form of the dense fog of confusion what had taken up residence in Aziraphale's mind for so long. It all seemed a little clearer somehow and the barbs within his mind were numbed by it. "Taking that first _bite_. It should be _okay_ to touch. Touch isn't just about selfish gratification. I mean, conversation can be fake and cheap. As can kissing, as can... sex. There's no difference, not when it comes down to brass tacks."

"Well, I..." He wasn't sure why he was stuttering. It was making sense, all of it. He was glad for it. And yet...

"Answer me honestly. Please." Aziraphale lifted his gaze in response to Crowley's summons. He was looking at him over his glasses again. He appeared far the more defenceless than he had thus far. "Did you... enjoy the kiss?"

Aziraphale hesitated a moment. This was his own hurdle, giving those feelings some sort of hard edges. Picking apart the pieces of that jigsaw puzzle from all the other conflagrating portions what had been set within the box to confuse him. Age old constraints, prejudices and fears rose up sharply inside of him. And a stranger one, yet. That his entire relationship with Crowley, one that had sustained them rather the satisfactorily for the past six thousand years, was about to change forever.

"Yes." He said softly, the word imparted much as a painful whimper. His fingers pinched in so tightly about their counterparts that his deftly filed nails left their marks upon corresponding knuckles. One of Crowley's brows lifted to form what might be considered a near perfect question mark upon the page of his face.

"Really? Because it seems like you would have enjoyed having sharpened bamboo driven up underneath your toenails more."

"I just... it feels... wrong to take... to take..." He looked away now, that self styled shame welling up inside of him. "-pleasure in something that I am attaining primarily for my own benefit. At _your_ expense."

Crowley tilted back his head, casting the groan of his irritation towards the ceiling.

"Oh, that's the biggest load of horse trollop. This is the sort of heavy handed celestial guilt what's tripping you up at days close." He jabbed one of his fingers, now near entirely void of tremors down so hard onto the kitchen bench that he just about jarred the blessed thing. "You seem to be stuck on the idea that physical touch is somehow inherently sinful. But so much of love is a _shared_ experience. Is it any more sinful than your sitting at a table enjoying a mouthful of cake while I sit there and wait for you to finish it?" Aziraphale's features wrenched themselves out of the deep castigation into which they were heavily drenched and shifted instead to encapsulate something what might be considered contrarily thoughtful. This had obviously made some sense to him; as food based comparisons so often did. "At the very least, a kiss is something we can both enjoy _together_. It's an act of _love,_ not the sort of transient pleasure you get from passing a block of chocolate over your tongue. Seems less selfish, when you think about it, really." He sniffed, glancing back towards the vainglorious little cupcake. " I mean, you're the one who reads the books; you should know that not all touch is rooted in sex. And even if it is, what the Heaven does it matter? What sin is there in enjoying the physical; enjoying one another's touch? Sex can be romantic. It can be soft and wholesome and loving and inclusive, I'm sure."

"Is that something you may... want?" Aziraphale closed his eyes, pulling himself together. This was an important question to ask. To ascertain. To... prepare himself for. "To... to make... love?"

Crowley knew entirely well that this above all was going to shake the angel, but they had come too far now for him to sugar coat his desires. "... Yeah. I uh... I do. Yeah." He said, giving a small, somewhat helpless smile. He felt very exposed in admitting to this; as though he were laying bare the naked bonds of his spirit and trusting that all its stretch marks, rolls and imperfections were not about to be laughed at. "To be honest, none of this has ever been off the table for me, angel. I'm _not_ human; it's not like I've been panting after it for six thousand years. But I wouldn't have said no if you'd jumped on me that very first day in the garden. Would have given it a go, at least."

"Well I hardly think that was going to happen!" Aziraphale exclaimed, taking the time to look offended by the wanton suggestion. "You may be handsome but I _do_ have my standards!"

Crowley chuckled, for the outrage was every bit as charming as it ever was. "You _know_ what I mean. I would be comfortable with being with you in whatever form it is that you wished for it to take. ...Or, so I thought. It's just..." He jutted his lips off to the side and grunted. "I dunno... guess I just always thought that if... one day we didn't have Heaven or Hell to worry about...If you were in fact the master of your own making... Suppose I just assumed that it was _them_ what was the reason you never wanted to get much closer. But they still weigh heavy on you, don't they?" He quirked a fingertip towards the ceiling. " _Old HQ_. Or maybe it's not so much that. A part of me thinks that you're afraid."

"I _am_ afraid." Aziraphale admitted. It was a time now for truth. Even if the truth was not altogether flattering, or brave. It was honest and if there was one person in all the known worlds with whom he ought be honest, it was incontestably Crowley. "I _know_ that it is foolish. And awful. And _unfair_. Because what I feel for you should be more than enough to make the rest of it seem simple, but-"

"You're afraid that giving yourself over to me would _damn_ you."

And there it was. The splinter in his mind what Aziraphale could never so much as bear to give form. He had skirted about this one, explored every other reason for his hesitation, his fears. But this was... it was the big one. It was the cruel one. The age old prejudice. It was where the word _'fraternizing'_ had come from. And _'I am a great deal holier than thou'_. The _'You's_ ' instead of the _'We's'_. All the cruellest, most conceited, defiant and defensive things what he might ever have felt and directed towards Crowley in his more impassioned of moments.

"It's not that I'm consciously afraid-" Another distinction he thought ever so important to make clear. Crowley once again surprised him in demonstrating in turn just how insightful, intelligent and caring he was, by saying in response:

"- just something inside of you, lurking at the rear of your mind."

"Like a splinter." Aziraphale said, using the word he felt best described it. He took up the knuckles of his right hand, banged them lightly, yet with some fervency against the side of his head. "Like a sodding splinter made from steel that I just can't seem to pry out."

"They _threw you out,_ angel." Crowley was giving him that same sad look he had that night on the bus stop bench. When he had gently reminded the angel that his bookshop had, at least in the reality from which they had just emerged, burned down. The one which made Aziraphale every so often feel as though the demon were in fact ages older, wiser and more patient and knowledgeable than he himself.

"I know."

"It's all over. They don't _care_ what you do anymore. They don't care what _we_ do. We could go and get hitched at the Sydney Mardi Gras wearing five foot tall fruit hats and chocolate sauce bikini's and they wouldn't give two hoots."

"I know, I understand all that, _I do_." Aziraphale said, trying even as he did to not imagine himself wearing a chocolate sauce bikini and a five foot tall fruit rimmed hat. Those were two things much more suited to a summers afternoon; chocolate sauce in a bowl and fruit on skewers ready to be dipped. Not assembled into some bizarre Carmen Miranda-esque culinary garment to be paraded about for all and sundry to goggle at. "All I ask is for you to acknowledge is that I _have_ this fear. Regardless of how pointless it is, how offensive and hurtful it is. I don't _want_ this fear. I want to be shot of it but I just can't seem to shake the damned thing. The feeling is so very strong at times!"

"Stronger than what you feel for me?" Crowley asked, the slightest hitch to his voice. The look on his face and the sadness which touched itself to the borders of his tone were enough to wrench Aziraphale firmly out of the confusing cluster of emotions swirling about inside of him and instil some much needed clarity.

"No. Absolutely not." He had been firm with Crowley many a time throughout their six thousand year acquaintance. Never had he been quite so firm as this very moment. "There is nothing stronger which exists inside of me than what I feel for you. I wouldn't be standing here, otherwise."

The words had pleased, surprised and embarrassed Crowley a little. A demon, ever so practiced in portraying a calm and cool demeanour was set to biting his lip like a schoolgirl who had seen the Yes circled on her 'Do you like me - Yes or No' slip after having it passed back to her by the boy she fancied. Crowley felt similarly overcome and he glanced away, trying without much success to pull himself together. He was suddenly and acutely at odds with his body and ever so much aware that the modicum of control he had been enjoying in this situation had been systematically routed in just this one succinct and loving statement alone.

"Wasn't expecting that."

"No, I can tell." Aziraphale was concerned about the icing melting on the cupcake and so he took it upon himself to return the baked good to the fridge. Now that it seemed Crowley's point had been proven. "You know, this all rather begs the question that if you are in fact so keen for us to incorporate a physical aspect to our relationship, why you felt the need to run away the other night after you kissed me."

"Because you started kissing me _back_. And I thought that's probably what I wanted." Crowley sighed, chewing at a corner of his lip. This was all... very real all of a sudden. "Then I realized I wanted it just a little _too_ much. And you probably wanted it a whole lot less than I did."

"What do you mean?" Aziraphale asked, closing the fridge and returning to his unconsciously designated post beside the table. He was still holding onto the work uniform and had been the entire time they'd been talking. It seemed strange that he hadn't yet set it down. As though it were serving as some manner of... shield.

"Don't be stupid. We both know what I mean. The second you... parted your lips..." Crowley sounded a Heaven of a lot cooler than how he was actually feeling. There was sweat popping out on the back of his neck like voles erupting from holes in an otherwise perfectly groomed front garden. "I wanted you more than anything I ever wanted in all my life. Enough that I could have hurt you, if only it meant that I could _consume_ you. Enough to take a bite out of your very soul." He was really wishing he carried a handkerchief now. This was more the likely about to turn into an unsightly stain down the back of his work shirt. "Knew I had to stop. There's more than that to it, of course. But that was enough. I've spent six thousand years trying to protect you, Aziraphale. Never thought I'd have to go and protect you from myself, but there you go. Ain't irony a bitch, huh?"

"What... what did you suppose was going to happen if you... if you _didn't_ pull away?"

"Something I'm quite sure you're not ready for." Crowley said, wondering even as he said it whether he was in fact any more the ready for such a... thing than the angel. He might have been a demon, but that meant zilch so far as sex was concerned. "Believe it or not Aziraphale, I'm no better with any of this stuff than you are. I'm just better at accepting it. I've been okay with being at arms length all these years. There were fences in place. Rules, boundaries, reasons, permissions, un-permissions. But those aren't there any more. I can't stop thinking of the freedom it brings. The possibilities. Having you not at arms length but within fingers reach..." He held up a hand, spread his fingers apart just enough so as to stare at Aziraphale between them. Dropped it back into the safe crook of his elbow. "It scares me. It scares me that I want it for the wrong reasons. I _like_ tempting you. I _like_ the fact that you're an angel, I'm a demon and that I can talk you around to things. I talked you into the Arrangement. I talked you into taking that first bite of food. But I don't want to talk you around to this. Not _this_. I don't want to try to convince you of things that you don't, a hundred percent, feel at ease with. That you don't _want_."

"But I _do_ want you." Aziraphale said quietly and it was an admission enough to near cripple the both of them in one fell swoop.

"Don't say that." Crowley said. That small flush of hope was so strong, so much more the temptation than any he himself might ever have offered. He wanted so desperately for it to be within reach.

"Why?" The angel asked, who had felt himself very courageous in speaking up. For voicing what it was that he was truly feeling, in spite of all those awful celestial barbs driving themselves tooth and nail into his gentle soul.

"Because we both know it's not true. Just like in the car the other day. Kissing me because you thought that was what I wanted you to do. Because that's what an angel _should_ do. Make others happy, even at the expense of themselves. Isn't' that right?"

Aziraphale had been thinking this very thing, it was true. Blessed moments before he had genuinely started to take enjoyment in the act for himself. Crowley was aware of that, to some degree. They knew each other too well at times.

"Yes, it's true that I want to make you happy but that is not the whole reason that I kissed you back." Aziraphale said, adding just a little more of that firm candour to his voice. "What I am _trying_ to tell you, if you would desist with being so stubborn for just one moment is that... I want it too."

Crowley's glasses had dropped a little lower on the bridge of his nose. It hadn't been intentional. This was ever so telling to Aziraphale. The demon was never one to present a dishevelled façade. Most every movement was predetermined, fraught with great design and intent. It was how most effective temptations were executed, of course. This lapse, slight as it might seen in the eyes of others, was gargantuan in Aziraphale's.

"I want to be... closer." Said the angel. It took a great deal of strength, of courage to say this. But it warmed him. It warmed him the more to see the lines in Crowley's face soften, for the tension to ease down out of shoulders he probably wasn't even the aware of his having hiked up so high as they were. "It's just... these walls that are inside of me... Heaven's fingernail... It _scratches_ , every time I... I try to explore this."

"It hurts you?" Crowley asked, genuine concern making its mark in his face now. He hadn't even considered that the struggle Aziraphale was experiencing might in fact have been a physical one quite as much as it was a mental, spiritual and emotional one.

"Yes. It does. But I want you to know that that pain has _nothing_ to do with what I feel for you. Whatever this is, it is something that is congruent in the makeup of what makes an angel an angel. It is through no fault of your own." He squared up. He couldn't remember the words that he had been planning to say; not entirely. But he knew full well what it was that he _wanted_ to say. The words he wished he had said the previous night, when Crowley had been standing in the doorway; all but begging for him to take that first step.

"I am not and _never_ have been ashamed of you, Crowley. The very thought that you could be going through life believing such a thing is more painful than that infinitesimal scratching against my soul." Warmth flooded his face as Crowley first tilted his head back and then down, pushing his glasses out of the way of his hand to press his fingers against his eyes. His shoulders shuddered with silent sobs, fought ever so hard to contain but unable to temper down. "I _adore_ you, my dear. I absolutely, unequivocally adore you. I am prouder of you with every day that passes and prouder still that I am the person to whom you have invested ever so much of your time and your life and your heart. Please don't _ever_ doubt that. Any weakness of character I might exhibit is not at all a reflection of my feelings for you. There is nothing stronger than that."

Crowley was unable to respond for quite some time. He was much too overwhelmed, far too relieved to put anything into words. He pursed his lips and looked away, wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. The sight was astonishing to Aziraphale. He had never before seen Crowley cry. The tears were a new thing. They were pure and crystalline and more beautiful than anything he could ever remember seeing. A demon's tears... Wrought from sadness of relief, of _love_...

Crowley for his part felt as though an industrial clamp had been eased from about the cage of his chest. He had little idea as to just how much pain, how much tension he'd been holding onto those last few months. The fear that Aziraphale would not have felt the same. Would have awkwardly advised that something deeper, something physical was not anything of which he was interested and further denominate that bond which they so obviously shared. The relief was staggering. So much so, that the demon hadn't been aware of the fact that he had been crying. Well... he was _aware_ but more to the point was that he was not aware of his usual need to veil such things.

And it wasn't crying. Not really. A couple of little tears. Nothing to write home about.

"Shit." He nonetheless cursed, thinking it a very good thing that this hadn't happened whilst he was still working for hell. Dropping your emotional bundle in front of an angel would have been cause for any number of violent ribbings. "Stupid bastard. What the Heaven do you go and say to something like that?"

"You don't need to say anything." Aziraphale took a measured breath and slowly placed the bundle of clothes down on the nearby table. His heart thundered through its next however so many beats, leaving him feeling strangely dizzy. "It's... it's going to take some time but... I mean to work on it. To break down those walls so that the... the scratching... doesn't hurt so much."

"I don't want you _hurting_ , angel." Crowley said, utilizing his thumbs now so as to scoop out the last of the tears from the bags beneath his eyes. Shoot. His poor human body really wasn't getting enough sleep. "I didn't even think that-"

"It's all right." Aziraphale smiled. He took a step. The step resonated. He took another and then another still. It was perhaps only seven or so steps to close the gap what rested between both himself and Crowley but each of them sounded out just as resolutely and as deeply as the tolling of an ancient bell. Seven small steps to bring close an immeasurable and cavernous distance, what might have transcended further still than the very most remote of distant stars.

Crowley watched him, those large eyes growing more the luminous by the moment. His Adams apple rose and fell as he swallowed. Whilst words had been parried, the demon had felt himself, much as always, incontestably in control. Now that it was motion what carried forward and not tarrying of tongues, he was uncertain as to just what grip he might have maintained upon the wheel.

He could feel it being gently guided out from underneath the hold of his metaphorical fingers and into those instead of Aziraphale, who was savouring every moment; eyes softly shining as he reached down and took Crowley's glasses, placing them onto the bench beside them. They were close now. Very close. Crowley's hand was still poised much as it had been when the glasses had been pinched between his fingers. Aziraphale's own hand sought to fill the gap.

"It's quite all right." The angel whispered, pressing his fingers up between those of the demon's. Their palms touched, thumbs grazed and caressed like lovers come together. Pushing back against the awful barbs what might otherwise have held him at bay, Aziraphale glanced his palm over Crowley's cheek, permitted himself that lovely flush of desire what came with the brushing of those exquisite cheekbones and twined his hand about the back of the demons neck. He felt the short hairs there at attention; the down which might have been soft if not for the razor what kept it short.

They did not come together with great and abrupt passion, but softly and slowly, their lips meeting with a tenderness which lacked nothing of the depth of feeling at its foundations.

The joining was yet enough to sunder those last remaining vestiges of uncertainty and the draw became tighter still; Crowley's arm finding purchase about Aziraphale's shoulders and bringing their bodies in flush and warm and wanting. Their fingers, poised still by their side, wove their own dance; entwining, twisting and stroking, like a pair of amative snakes stowed together in a basket long secreted from the light of day. The barbs panged at Aziraphale fiercely and he countered this by projecting deeper still into the physical; the very new and very fine feeling of lips meeting, of breaths deepening, of the pressured caress of hands and thighs and everything else in-between.

As Crowley parted his lips to take yet another indulgent sup of his own, Aziraphale seized the opportunity for which he had been waiting and glanced his tongue into the gap made briefly between their heated mouths. He remembered Crowley having done so that first time they had kissed in his car and he had wanted to be the one to do so now; to reassure the demon that it was okay. That he truly did want this quite so much as he did.

Crowley pulled back slightly when he felt the darting touch of Aziraphale's tongue. His lips parted still, not so far removed that one could suggest he had in fact broken the kiss but was uncertain as to how to proceed. Aziraphale once more reminded himself that this was not just new to him, but to _both_ of them.

"It's okay." He softly murmured, sliding his hand back around and brushing over the rise of Crowley's cheek. Placed a feather light kiss to his lips; once, twice, three times. Between those soft and reassuring points of contact, he whispered: "Part your lips, my darling. It's okay. _Trust me.._."

Crowley did of course trust him and so he parted his lips, allowing Aziraphale's tongue to enter his mouth. Both moaned softly at the deepening of their kiss; a kiss quite extraordinary in its own right to serve as the highest intensity of pleasure either had ever cause to experience. It was a little awkward still, as they were new to it but the touch of one another's tongues was sensual and intimate and spoke a thousand words more than all the millions they had otherwise exchanged throughout the passing of the ages.

Aziraphale put his hand to the sway in Crowley's back. It had been an instinctual thing but the pleasure he derived from cupping that decadent indent, from tracing the inlay what prefaced the curve of his buttocks was wonderful. He pressed his palm in harder, took Crowley's bottom lip between his own and drew on it. The demon murmured; gave what sounded to be the softest of whimpers.

It roused something in Aziraphale; the understanding that they were both, in that very moment, awakening to the shared sensation of mutually discovered pleasure, caught up entirely with the attainment of one another. He pulled Crowley harder to him, slid the lengths of their tongues together, felt the demons fingers ghost throughout the tangles of his hair, the softly brokered utterance of his name spoken between heated breaths.

There existed nothing in this moment but the two of them, a kiss so many a thousand years in the making and the distant clicking of the breakroom door as it swung open behind them.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If I was caught doing that in my workplace, I would most definitely be fired. (Shrugs) Oh well. That's a problem for another chapter, ay? ;)
> 
> I have to admit, that this is one of my favourite scenes written thus far. Felt like their proper first kiss and the first real sign of Aziraphale stepping up and taking some responsibility for his feelings. Not to mention how purely freeing it is for Crowley; to realise that the future he wants so desperately may actually be attainable. I remember finding it very cathartic to write, actually.
> 
> If you have any questions or thoughts on the piece, feel free to ask and or share. Hope that you enjoyed and I shall see you back shortly for the following updates! Good god, I just wanna get some new content out your way soon, guys! On the plus side, I AM actually working on the new chapter as I go so, fingers crossed!
> 
> Until next time, do take care of yourselves beautiful people!
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~Madammortis~ xxx ooo


	22. Or, in which we learn a valuable lesson about feeding ducks in the park.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Angry? Oh, I hardly think that does the word at all justice, my dear." He paused as they crossed the street, cars slowing so as to permit them safe passage. The drivers were not even the least aware of their having feathered their brakes at all. "She is afraid that he will hurt her."
> 
> "Oh, he will." Said Invidia, not bothering the least with sugar coating it. That was hardly a Vice's want, to attempt to white wash a circumstance what was otherwise irredeemable. "Nothing more to be certain. The Vice and the Virtue are entitled to one another. Their passions, their will, their desires must be shared..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Happy 2020 everybody! I hope you all had a wonderful New Years; celebrating in what ever way pleased you to do so. I myself had a couple of single malts with the husband, chatted drunkenly and likely impertinently with the next door neighbour and then waddled off to bed, where I was awkwardly spooned between aforementioned husband and overtired dog. It was like the worlds saddest ever menage a trois, except there was nothing in the way of anything what might be mistaken for sex. (I'm certain you would all be very much relieved to hear).
> 
> I am so super pumped for what I have planned for The Three Stages in 2020! Instead of the slow continual drive of the will they/won't they Aziraphale/Crowley romance, I am finally going to be introducing some action into this dialogue heavy, dribble box of a story. And far more sex, of course. That most definitely falls under the banner heading of 'action', so far as I'm concerned. Now I just need to research more adjectives I can use in place of 'groaned'... Feel like that one is gonna get old, very quickly.
> 
> But, I am getting ahead of myself. I still need to finish all this wondrous subdividing first! As always, thanks so much to everybody for your patience, and thank you also for reading, dropping me a kudos and extra big huggle bug thanks to those who leave comments! I don't get to swim in them, Scrooge McDuck style like a lot of other Good Omens fanfic writers out there, so I truly do value and treasure every single one that I receive :) It lets me know that you guys are still on the journey with me, and also that you might have liked the story beyond the first chapter.
> 
> That being said, there is absolutely no pressure to leave comments if all you would like to do is come and have a nice, quiet, relaxing read. You do you, boo :)
> 
> Good Omens-ervation of the day: Sometimes I feel as though I am the only member of the fandom that does not have Crowley growing his hair out again. Don't get me wrong; David Tennant has the jaw structure and exquisite features what give credit to any hairstyle and, yes, I was not immune to how good 'Crowley' looked with his little half-pulled back bun thing that everyone ejaculates over. I've just always preferred short hair; on women as well as men. I think a beautiful face stands out more with short hair, and I honestly think Crowley looks a freakin' spunk bubble with his hair cut into its little spiky. (Shrugs) That's just me, though. Fandom is a wonderful world where we are free to indulge what we enjoy, and if you personally get off on Crowley with long, flowing lustrous locks what would put a palomino to shame, then go crazy with it. Outside of flashback scenes, however, it is not going to happen in this fic. No matter how much I love the idea of Aziraphale grabbing a big handful of it during particular not-safe-for-work... moments. (Drifts droolingly away into fantasy land)
> 
> (Clears throat) Anyway, moving right along! I'm dropping two updates at once and aiming to get larger chunks done over the next couple of days. Here is the follow on from last chapter. I hope you enjoy, gentle readers, and I shall catch you on the far side!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**London's Soho ** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

Humanitas had been knocking on the front door of _**A.Z. Fell & Co **_for quite some time.

Well, not _consecutive_ time. That might very well have been considered far too sad for words and a terrible indictment of his not having otherwise the more interesting things to do with his day.

He had gone and attended to some other business when it became apparent that his summons was not being adhered to. Taken a short walk, purchased a coffee and a poppy seed muffin. Shared most of said muffin with the rather forthright ducks of St James's Park. Received a rather considerable fine from a somewhat constipated looking gentleman for feeding the ducks a poppy seed muffin St James's Park. Went to the post office and summarily paid the fine. Certainly, he might have used his magic to had dispensed with the matter entirely, but that was hardly in the nature of what kindness was all about, wasn't it?

Humanitas had in fact popped back to Aziraphale's store approximately three times in the course of one morning. He had supposed that the angel might very well have taken himself out and about on some manner of adventure, more the likely concerning the opening of some new delicatessen or patisserie or whatever other food specific organisation might have sprung up in Soho and might be frequented at that time of day. But it was strange for him to in fact be absent from the store for hours at a time.

At least it had been, so far as Humanitas was aware. And he felt that he did rather know the angel relatively well. They had been acquainted for over six thousand years, after all.

"Funny. He normally sings out that he's closed, in the least." Humanitas checked his watch; fake leather, (of course) older than the hills and encapsulating granule thin filaments what might have once been a battery but had rotted away over forty years prior. Pure force of will kept the hands ticking over and these hands indicated that the time was currently eleven am. "Odd time of day to be out. Breakfast must have run late..."

Humanitas supposed there were any number of things what might waylay an otherwise simple natured angel in todays' fast paced society. Indeed, it was more the likely that he had gotten caught up in some sort of caper orchestrated by his equally fast paced little ginger-haired demon friend. A possibility for which the Virtue could hardly imagine ever holding the angel to task. A handsome face was near impossible to say no to, at least so far as his own experiences were concerned.

The Virtue was snapped smartly out of his reveries by the itinerant jingling of his mobile phone. It was antiquated, much as his watch, and still had a small antenna which he was required to first yank out from the main body before flipping open the base and pressing yet another button further to answer it.

"Yes, hello?"

There was a brief burst of static interference, which the Virtue cleared with the slightest infinitesimal flicker of his mind. A voice what he hadn't heard for some time came through with a degree of clarity what a mobile phone of that advanced age really ought not to have succeeded with.

"Humanitas? It's Patientia."

Humanitas's smile warmed all the more brightly beneath the apron of his thick, impeccably trimmed moustache.

"Hello there, my dear! Oh it's been ever so long. How the devil are you?"

"To be honest... going out of my mind, a little." She gave a slight, rather the more feminine sounding chuckle. Patientia, the Virtue of Patience, was one of the few of their kind what chose to transition between genders throughout the passing of the years on earth. It was a means, they found, of better accommodating and understanding the various fluxes and particular circumstances of each individual they encountered. To better inform their practice.

In the past twenty years, she had been living as female; though Humanitas knew full well that the vulnerability in their voice would not have been less impactful, than if she had been male. The fear was so sepulchral. It resonated even through the speaker of the primordial mobile device.

"I... yes, the others told me that he..." Humanitas swallowed, surprising himself in that feeling of anxiety what had formed itself into a mean little lump in the nadir of his throat. It was rare, for creatures such as them. Secondary in power only to the Lord God, herself. "Well, that he's back."

"He landed somewhere in Italy." Patientia confirmed, her voice quavering. "Making his way closer by the day." She took a breath and Humanitas could near about feel her working on each individual nerve in her body so as to try and keep herself from falling apart. The drawing together alone would have been shock enough; after that insurmountable distance what had been dropped between the counterparts. But she, for that reason, was privy to the inner most workings of her other half. "I can _feel_ it. In the earth. The air. He's... he's so... _angry."_

"Well, we all knew he was likely to be rather cross. Considering the circumstances." It was a vacillating understatement, of course. He turned his attention to more the relevant matters. Patientia had called him specifically and he had some understanding as to why. He was the living epitome of kindness, after all. "Where are you now?"

"Been plying my wares in America, for all the good it seems to be doing." She had a genuine little laugh at her own self-imposed folly. "Patience appears to be something of a foreign concept over here."

"Generational I think, dear." Humanitas remarked, fairly. "Not much better at it in most walks of the world, I'm afraid."

"True." She chuckled and Humanitas registered a muffled voice off in the background of wherever it was she must have been lingering. "I'm just about to board a plane back to England. He'll be arriving there soon. ...I need to meet him first."

"Let me know when your flight gets in. I can come with you to meet him."

" _No_. No, that... that wouldn't be a good idea... he's been gone so long. He was a handful before the sentencing, but now..." Patientia was clearly going to enormous strains to hold herself together but the terror was starting to take hold. He could hear it leaching into her words, twisting what he knew to be tears from her olive shaped eyes. "He might kill even _me_. He'll... well, he'll hurt me, anyway. He always did."

"Oh, my dear..." Humanitas murmured, taking a handkerchief from his breast pocket and using it to wipe at his own eyes. He knew entirely well in just what manner Ira meant to 'harm' his counterpart. They had seen it happen before; though Patientia had done her utmost to have kept it quiet, fearing reprisal on the part of her other half. It had been one of the reasons as to why they had agreed to send him far, far away in the first place. "Can you... not change your physicality? Would he be the less likely to harm you if you present yourself as male for the inaugural meeting?"

Patientia barked a bitter sounding laugh. "You _must_ be joking. The body doesn't matter. So long as there's an orifice in which to stick it, what difference is the wrapping? And if there's no orifice available, he'll just go and tear me a new one." She had succumbed entirely to tears now and Humanitas could see her plain as day in his minds eye; slumped on a bench outside of the airport, cigarette dangling from between limp fingers and shoulders shaking with the force of her misery. "I... I'm afraid he will kill me. Over seven thousand years, Humanitas... He'll break all my bones, make me bleed... I'm so... _I'm so fucking scared.._."

"I shall come with you." Said the Virtue of Kindness with a firmness of tone he wasn't oft to employ. "You don't need to face this alone, Patientia."

"Please my darling, you are the very sweetest and gentlest of us all. I couldn't have you brought to harm. None of you." She sighed, marshalling some phantom degree of strength from some uncharted corner of her spirit and took another deep suck from the filter of her smoke. "No. He is my shadow. My responsibility. He has greatest need of me yet. The pull between us is worse still than the pain I know is coming."

"Is there anything at all I can do? _Anything?_ "

"Just answer my calls. Such as you always do." He could see her still in the screen at the rear of his mind, mustering up that brave and selfless smile they all knew so well. "I'll see you soon."

"Yes. Fly safe." Humanitas murmured, waiting until it was she what had terminated the call before folding his phone back in upon itself and slipping it into his inside pocket. He spent a while simply standing there, stretching out the corners of his mind in a bid to touch to the borders of Ira's currently mobile rage. There was only silence in return. Strange to think, how something could be so resounding and violent to one of his kin and yet so indistinguishable to him.

A pair of hands slipped suddenly around to cover his eyes and he might have felt a burst of panic if not for the familiar and much coveted scent of oriental perfume drifting up to fill the channels of his nose.

"Guess who, my love?" Came the melodic voice from just behind his ear. His smile curled tightly in the corners so it appeared to be paying tribute to the gloriously styled hank of facial hair what rested above it.

"The same perfume as two hundred years ago. Does nothing change?"

"Why should I change something I know full well that you adore?" The hands slid away from his eyes and Humanitas turned. A woman was standing before him; Indian, so far as appearances were concerned and looking to be in her early to mid fifties. She was dressed in a bright, exotically detailed green sari and possessed the sort of brilliant, understated shine of a pearl.

"It's been too long." Invidia said, her accented voice (adopted entirely as keeping with appearances) and her lips curled up to form a lovely, subtle bow. Her hands, each exquisitely ornamented, refined and with nails scrupulously attended to, crossed over to rest abridge of her hips, with fingers lightly merged. The very definition of composure, which was a long running joke between the pair. It was such a feeble cover for the otherwise clamorous emotion just so barely restrained at their meetings.

"Ten years. Such lonely years at that." He extended his arms to her and she moved so as to be coveted by them. The kiss they shared conveyed a passion unrivalled by that shared between any two humans in all the ages having long since passed. Even when parted, their love could be readily measured in the passing of palms and fingers and gazes alone; caresses what reminded their owner of shapes long since relegated to memory.

"Astonishingly beautiful as ever." Humanitas at long last remarked, taking the delicate fingers of his counterpart between his own and guiding her to spin beneath the canopy of his arm.

"You always say that." Invidia smiled, lifting the hem of her sari so that the extravagant detail could best be admired. Since the moment of its cultural rise, Invidia had always adored India; in particular, its' fashion and architecture. It was of her opinion, that nothing save the decadent designs of the ancient world of Japan had ever compared to it. She spent much of her time on earth in India, carving out a home for herself and conducting what business what required direction from there.

Humanitas, of course, was never one to abide settling down. He would consider it far too self-indulgent. The world was much in need of kindness and sitting idle was not the means by which to most capably distil his influence. It required travel; both frequent and far.

Which was a shame for two creatures what loved one another quite as exquisitely as they did. Of the fourteen Vices and Virtues, they were the counterparts what were most deeply impassioned by one another; who were incomparably and unapologetically bonded.

Earth life might have worked to draw them apart all these years but distance changed nothing so far as what it was they felt for one another.

And now... now they need never be apart again.

"I always _need_ to say that." Humanitas established, with a knowing twinkle of the eye. "You would suspect me of debauchery otherwise."

"Terrible." The Vice of Envy remarked, knowing it to be true and as frustrated by her integrated motivations as she always had been. "I trust that you will always be faithful but the long years apart... The plethora of willing, available human bodies-"

"-dim in abject comparison to that of your own, my dear. You know full well there is not but another star in the sky what shines brighter than you. You are my world, my Heaven, my everything." He kissed the back of her hand, his thick moustache tickling as it brushed atop her knuckles. She gave that same tinkling laugh; what always sounded so distinctly of a gathering of tiny bells, caught in a gentle breeze.

"I do love when you lay it on thick." She spared a glance towards the book shop, the corner of her lip twitching tellingly. "Visiting your little _friend_ again?"

Invidia was not fond of Aziraphale, and ever the less fond of the friendship he shared with her counterpart. She would have much preferred to portray security in her relationship, but it was next to impossible when your very essence was that of envy itself. She could never help but take to wondering as to whether Humanitas derived something from his friendship with the angel, that she herself was unable to provide him with.

It was a fear what scraped against her soul like a steel grater.

"That was the intention but he doesn't appear to be in." Humanitas petted a hand to the satchel he continued lugging about over his left shoulder. He was aware that the weight was likely to be bending his spine permanently crooked like a banana, but it was a simple fix really and he'd had the bag an awful long time. And his were personal possessions what he could hardly bear the thought of parting with. So many gifts of gratitude from those humans he had helped... "Had this book over three decades now, you would think him anxious to be getting it back."

"Well I'm quite certain he hasn't been waiting around for it for thirty years." Invidia rolled her eyes, placing her hand in the crook of Humanitas's arm and giving him a light tug so as to guide him away down the footpath. "Come with me. You have time to kill and I rather fancy a reunion what takes place betwixt the privacy of four walls, don't you?"

It was crowded that morning, but the thronging human citizens found themselves compelled to move out of the way of the oddly paired couple; giving them free pass to the centre of the footpath. Even those mothers with prams found themselves willing to risk ejecting their newborns into the rush hour traffic, rather than continue on down the straight and otherwise vehicle free narrow.

"My dear, a demon could learn a thing or two about tempting from that wily tongue of yours." Humanitas said with a soft chuckle. His tone was somewhat distant, however and though it were unlikely to have been picked up on by those who did not know him, Invidia was intricately familiar with the ins and outs of her counterpart (though currently more the interested in exploring the in's, as it were) and observed what might otherwise have been interpreted as an ever so subtle nuance.

"You seem distracted, my love." She said and knew, from this alone, that Humanitas would profess as to why. He was a Virtue and they were not taken to lying under most any circumstance. And he most certainly would never have lied to her.

"I am, rather." He glanced down at Invidia. His body was that of a tall man in his late sixties and she was very slight by comparison; such that it was a little jarring to see them walking side by side. "Just received a call from Patientia."

Invidia nodded thoughtfully, understanding much of the context without Humanitas being required to go into further detail.

"Of course. ... And... how does she fair...?"

"Truthfully?" Humanitas gazed ahead, his moustache twitching its discontent. "She sounds _terrified._ Absolutely at the end of her tether. I offered to go and meet him with her-"

"And she refused."

"Quite. You should think her trait that of stubbornness, rather than patience." He set a hand to his stomach, an old pain resurfacing violently as the acids twirled about against the lining. He had an ulcer somewhere in there. It flared up whenever he got to worrying at considerable depth about things. And this was a concern what was more than likely to spot another couple of additional sores for his efforts.

"She was the only one ever able to reign in Ira's impulses when they flared and even she struggled at times." Invidia rubbed a palm comfortingly over Humanitas's forearm. "I wager she is only meaning to protect you."

"Protect us all." He sighed and flinched as his stomach roiled again, wondering if there might be somewhere along the way they could stop for a glass of milk. About the only thing that really seemed to settle it. "I can't even imagine what it should be like. Seeing him again after all these long years..."

"That's going to be one _very_ angry Capital Vice."

" _Angry?_ Oh, I hardly think that does the word at all justice, my dear." He paused as they crossed the street, cars slowing so as to permit them safe passage. The drivers were not even the least aware of their having feathered their brakes at all. "She is afraid that he will hurt her."

"Oh, he will." Said Invidia, not bothering the least with sugar coating it. That was hardly a Vice's want, to attempt to white wash a circumstance what was otherwise irredeemable. "Nothing more to be certain. The Vice and the Virtue are entitled to one another. Their passions, their will, their desires must be shared."

"But he has been alone over seven thousand years. And he was positively _monstrous_ on a simple day by day basis. Even with more the..." He flinched his eyes shut; the thought abhorrent and distasteful. "... _means_ he found to... satiate his... temper."

"Darling, there is nothing we can do. Patientia won't die from it. It..." She got on her tippy toes, so as to glance her fingers down either side of Humanitas's kind, loving and deeply lined face. All the worries of the world, all the cruelties of man had aged him; wracked his human body in a way what could never be undone. It was typical, she thought, for him to care so intensely for anything and everything other than himself. The sooner they could wipe those entitled wretches from the face of God's good earth, the better. "It will happen. She will heal and then the good work will begin."

"The _work_ , you mean." He said, in a voice about as close to testy as Kindness could perpetuate. "Don't delineate it by referring to it as the 'good work'. We both know, at days end that it is simply 'work'. Thinking of it as 'good'... that just makes it all the more difficult to accommodate."

"Sometimes I hardly know whether it is that you are too sweet or too much in denial." Invidia smiled, raising her fingers so that a puddle into which they might otherwise have stepped dried up on the spot. "Either way, it is endearing and I do love you ever so much for it."

No more words were needed. Not for some time anyway. Over a decades worth of waiting was more the pressing matter. And such passions were hardly appeased by the inadequacy of conversation.

(One might go so far as to say that it was a life's lesson what quite a few creatures of the preternatural world were learning that very day!)

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks as always everyone for giving me just a little of your time today! If you enjoyed, it would float my boat immensely if you were to take the time to inform me as to why. Or kick that Kudos button, right in its Human Testicles!
> 
> I humbly hope to host your presence over in the next update, kind reader :) Take care on your journey there, my darlings!
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	23. Or, in which a door is opened.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It had been a long few months without talk, without touch, without contact. The saturation of it served as something of an overdose to the perishing senses. Aziraphale might have laughed at the punch drunk look on Crowley's face when they parted; a giddy smile he was attempting to quash out of existence by pulling his lips in tight. He surrendered however to the overwhelming draw of the angel's warmth and pressed his head to the side of Aziraphale's; who held him quite as tightly as he so desired in what time they'd spent apart. Crowley inhaled deeply of the scent of the angels neck, pressed his face in there and sheathing his eyes a moment. There was time for this. He would MAKE time, if need be...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Random Good Omens-ervation of the day: You remember that scene in episode one, where Crowley pretty much got Aziraphale drunk on the pretext of talking him around to saving the world together (try his luck at getting into Aziraphale's pants)? Pretty iconic scene, really. Remember too, that wine bottle Aziraphale was having such a difficult time trying to decant into his glass; given the aforementioned drunkness? Did anyone else notice that the top of the bottle was broken? 
> 
> What in the name of God to those two dunder heads DO to that bottle? How much resistance did a simple cork put up, if smashing the top of the bottle clear off was the preferred solution? Why wasn't magic-ing the cork out of the neck of the bottle a viable option? How did they not get glass in their wine?
> 
> I mean, I'll be the first to admit (as a self-confessed soak) that there have been times I have been incredibly tempted to smash the head off of a bottle just to get to the self-medicinal nectar within. But I haven't. And those few times I have dropped a bag with a wine bottle in it and managed to save what wine I could, I always put that sunovabitch through a sieve first. (Nods sagely) Aziraphale? No fucks given. Just pours the wine straight into his glass, out of the shattered, broken neck and slurps drunkenly and yet seemingly, contentedly away. Shards of glass more the likely just swirling around in his belly, stomach lining being punitively shredded and resulting in a very painful, possibly life threatening 'evacuation' some hours down the track. (Shudders at the very thought of pissing out glass) That angel is both determined AND a badass.
> 
> I think about that scene way more than I really ought to. Wondering what exactly happened, what conversation was had, which culminated in the neck of that bottle being smashed. Wishing desperately to have seen it actually played out. Maybe I'll write it one day; who knows?
> 
> Okay, enough of my wankery for now. The next update, gentle readers! I hope that you enjoy, and I shall see you on the flip side!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**The Grange Estate Nursing home - London Suburbia ** _

Neither of them had been quick enough. Neither of them had cared to be quick enough.

The kiss was much too intense, much too needed. The world around them continued to move at the same pace as it had always done, but for Crowley, time had altogether ceased to exist. An ability he himself was capable of doling out where required, but it was not by his hands that the wheels beyond the veil ceased to churn the grinding sands forward.

It was the kiss. Aziraphale's kiss.

No, ... _their_ kiss.

The kiss that Aziraphale had initiated. The angel what hadn't contented himself with the simple taking of that first decisive step but rather plunged himself headlong into a full-blown triathlon. Had imparted upon Crowley a kiss such as the demon could only ever have dared to imagine; had cocked his head to the curious side in having been witness to such exchanges on television, on street corners under lambent, golden lights, at train stations, blanketed by tender fingers of bathetic fog. Had pondered, considered at depth, set a finger to the centre of his tongue as some minor means of replicating the physical sensation what might be experienced in a kiss so utterly transcendent with feeling.

Aziraphale seemed every bit as lost to the moment as Crowley. And far the more... ravenous than the demon had ever supposed him capable. The hand he had fixed to the sway of Crowley's back applied a possessive pressure, the thumb and fingers of his other hand sliding over and between the demons with ever the more intensifying need.

To say nothing of the claim he had made concerns Crowley's lips and tongue. There was hunger there. Hunger what sent Crowley's flesh to shivering in the bonds of his immalleable work uniform, rendered his knees weaker than they already were and made him physically ache with desire.

They were in fact pressed so tightly to one another, he could hardly imagine that Aziraphale would not be made aware of his 'desire'. He desperately wished to move his hips forward, an instinct for which the body cried out, but the door clicking open shot all that to spectacular shit.

"Whoa, _okay_ boys."

The last thing Crowley wanted in all of known creation was to break that kiss. If he was being honest (a trait not considered the least bit demonic but one with which he was ever so invariably acquainted) Crowley would much prefer in fact for the kiss to continue; with one minor adjustment of his in fact being hoisted onto the bench so that Aziraphale could move to stand between his legs.

His imagination gave a soft moan at the conjured image and Crowley near followed suit. But Aziraphale, being himself, of course, had more than the prescient desire to which he could capably attend, and one of these was his not wanting Crowley to get into trouble in his workplace. At the sound of the voice from the doorway, he turned his face away; leaving Crowley's own puckered lips suspended preposterously in mid-air.

"Don't get me wrong," Came the sound of Alice's ( _thank whoever_ ) voice from behind the now partially closed door. "It's not that I'm not _thrilled_ to see that the two of you have either made up or about to have some really mega intense hate sex, but Rita catches you doing that in work hours and it'll be both your arses off to PR. Plus... you know. I make coffee on that bench, Cumquat. Prefer that your arse wasn't rubbing up against it, yeah?"

"Sorry." Crowley stammered, placing a hand across his brow as some means of shielding his eyes and skittered his fingers along the benchtop in a bid to locate his glasses. "He, uh... well, I um..."

Whatever supposed cool was thought to be in possession by Anthony J. Crowley had seemingly taken a long saunter off of a very short pier. He couldn't seem to get the words out. His tongue felt numb, more from the shock of what had occurred rather than it having been blistered into a state of non-compliance by the insistence of Aziraphale's kiss. Aziraphale, who was attempting to assist Crowley in returning to some semblance of _status quo_ by slipping his hand from the small of his waist and disentangling their sweaty fingers from about one another's. Crowley wanted none of that. He wanted, in fact, to be anywhere but on the clock.

Alice gave an indulgent chuckle from her door side garrison. "Don't worry, mate. I don't see a kiss and tell. Just between us pigeons." Her hand edged around the peeling jam and she flicked her fingers in a sort of shooing gesture. "But seriously, wind it up before Rita comes a knocking."

"Yes. Of course." Aziraphale cleared his throat, casting a smile towards the young woman just out of sight in the hallway. "Ever so sorry."

The hand gave a carefree wave before retreating out of sight like an eel stealing itself into a gap between rocks. Alice's footsteps receded off into the middle distance and Crowley and Aziraphale took a much needed moment in which to pull themselves together.

Aziraphale cast his hands through his hair in a forwards motion, attempting to tame the curled locks which Crowley's fingers had hungrily caressed to every which way. Crowley had a brief, thirty second internal conversation with his nether regions; the context of which consisted predominantly of _'cease and desist.'_ Being a penis, it was of course in possession of selective hearing and wasn't much in the mood to adhere to its Generals commands.

"So..." Crowley eventually drawled, sliding his glasses back onto his substantially flushed face. He didn't bother with carrying the thought forward much further than this, but set it adrift in a silence what the angel could then shape in whatever fashion he saw fit.

"Yes. Rather." Aziraphale gave a nervous chuckle before reaching up to glance his warm palm over the curve of Crowley's ever the warmer cheek. "Your face is very red."

Crowley's as so described 'red face' scrunched together in embarrassed annoyance and he cuffed his fingers to the back of Aziraphale's wrist, not knocking so much as guiding the affectionate hand away.

"Shut up." He grumbled, doing an altogether far too terrible a job of looking nonchalant. There was a treacherous smile attempting to sneak on into the corners of his mouth, much the way a hungry child might endeavour to slink on out of their bedroom in the middle of the night to raid the cookie jar. His gaze dropped to survey the shiny linoleum between his paper wreathed shoes; a strange act for one such as him. To avoid rather than demand that eye contact. "And here's me thinking _you_ were the one needed protecting from _me_. Seems I had you pegged all wrong." He paused, glancing briefly at Aziraphale's contrarily contented expression. He had half expected to have seen the angel morph drastically into wide-eyed, gawping apoplectic remorse, now that the moment had passed. "You... really meant it though... eh?"

Aziraphale's eyes flecked briefly to the sides; though his smile did not falter. He was pondering the nature of the question, rather than sinking into a miasma of celestial based regret. Though given the fact that he was an angel, Crowley would hardly have been surprised if Aziraphale did in fact permit himself to founder beneath emotional quicksand with the same level of decorum a member of the Royal family demonstrates when greeting a political representative from a country of which they retained only limited vestiges of respect and civility. This was how in fact Crowley had played him when they had switched bodies. Composed, courageous, incontrovertibly classy. What the humans might have referred to as a 'gentleman's gentleman.' If he had been a man, that is.

"The, um... the words or the..." Aziraphale bounced a moment on his heels before returning his gaze to the demons. There was a softness in the bow of his brows; a dusting of vulnerability speckled through the lines of his forehead like arrow root crumbs. "-the kiss?"

"Both." Said Crowley, somewhat nonplussed that a distinction was required. Aziraphale gave a light chuckle, straightening up and placing his arms behind his back. Shoulders set square in their sockets, such that you could see his historic military training glint beneath the surface like the belly of a pertinent fish.

"I did."

The confirmation set quite a lot of feelings to swirling inside of Crowley. A great deal of these he would very much have liked to have acted on; in ways which would most definitely have seen the both of them marched off to PR and his work uniform all but ripped from his body (and not in the good way). But Crowley had not gotten as far as he had in this unpredictable world by being a fool.

Well... the jury was still out as to whether Crowley may in fact be considered a fool or not, but if he was indeed the Joker to have been slotted into the universal pack by some preternatural slight of hand, he was not a fool what acted without first exercising some avenue of caution.

Aziraphale had proven himself to be easily spooked by much less and far the more subtle declarations in the past. And he was still an angel, in spite of his secularization from Heaven's smudge free porcelain beset corridors. Angels could be a tricksy bunch and never the more idiotic then when it came to themselves.

"You're not just... saying and doing what you think you need to do? To make me happy?"

Aziraphale had somewhat expected the question, for it had been precisely what Crowley had said only mere minutes earlier. It was a little frustrating for that reason, for how much reassurance was needed, given what they had just shared?

"Crowley. You really rather put far too much emphasis on my apparently needing to sacrifice my worth and values and body for your happiness." He chuckled lightly, raising his hands so that the palms were directed towards the ceiling. "Frankly my dear, I'm not that invested."

Some of the tension left Crowley's body at this and he loosed an involuntary chuckle in conjunction of it. "Well ain't that a blessed relief." He eased slightly about Aziraphale, glancing towards the door and taking a few sharp sniffs in. Satisfied that a supplementary breach was not on the cards, he moved closer then to the angel. His eyes, insecure yet still and pining, peeked above the lenses of his glasses. "Mind if I... do it again? You know, just to uh... lock it in." He shrugged, wanting to make something in which he placed so much obvious stock, sound offhand. "So to speak?"

"I won't be getting you in trouble?"

"Oh, you got me into trouble a long time ago, angel." Crowley said, his smile as knowing as his words were truthful. "This would hardly be the first _or_ the last time, I wager."

Aziraphale, smiling gently, reached up to cup his hand once more to the side of Crowley's face. Crowley put his arms about him, a tenderness of embrace what left any of those they shared in days past, well and truly in the dust. The kiss was softer, more temperate. More permanent. Crowley was slightly taller than Aziraphale, but he appeared to be getting shorter by the moment; sinking down into his knees, all but melting into the protective slips of his shoes. He sighed softly between the parting of their lips, all the tension he had been holding onto draining out of his muscles so that Aziraphale served much the purpose of a construction frame; keeping him standing in spite of all efforts to dissolve into nothingness.

It had been a long few months without talk, without touch, without contact. The saturation of it served as something of an overdose to the perishing senses. Aziraphale might have laughed at the punch drunk look on Crowley's face when they parted; a giddy smile he was attempting to quash out of existence by pulling his lips in tight. He surrendered however to the overwhelming draw of the angel's warmth and pressed his head to the side of Aziraphale's; who held him quite as tightly as he so desired in what time they'd spent apart. Crowley inhaled deeply of the scent of the angels neck, pressed his face in there and sheathing his eyes a moment. There was time for this. He would _make_ time, if need be.

"I missed you."

"As did I, my dear." Aziraphale caressed the line of Crowley's back with loving indifference to the damp patch of sweat what had formed on his work shirt. "You were well rather cruel, all things considered."

"I was confused." Crowley's words made a soft vibration against the side of his neck. "I was... scared I was about to lose you forever and I... I couldn't deal with hearing an answer I didn't want. It was easier to run."

"Is that why you stayed away?"

"One of the reason's. Mainly, I was trying to figure out if I would be able to go on living without you." Crowley laughed humourlessly. "Apparently, I was doing a shithouse job of it."

"Well don't you feel awful silly now." Aziraphale turned and lent his lips to the side of Crowley's face. Felt the demon just about purr at the point of contact. "All this much to do about nothing."

Crowley pushed back from Aziraphale, just hard enough to make a point of it. The embrace had been blissful, but the angels words had managed to annoy him some. A sort of a playing down as to, what he felt were, very sensible reasons for his having done what he had done.

"Hardly _nothing_ , angel. Quite a bit more than 'nothing'. And hey, it's not like you were handling things well. You were still trying to convince yourself that we were cut and dry friendsss."

"Yes, well, if it helps to set your mind at ease." Aziraphale slipped his hand into the pocket of his coat and took out his rather old, trusty and ever more tattered wallet. With a flick of his wrist, he separated the leather halves to expose the plastic panel in which he had, until previously, stored his Frequent Diners Club card. He held it out to Crowley, indicating that he should take it. "There."

Demons never much liked to be caught in a moment of weakness. Crowley was hardly an exception. He might have been appreciably softer than the bulk of his kind, but emotional apertures offered far too much of a glimpse of an otherwise vulnerably underbelly. Exploitation was a readily accepted means of getting things done in Hell. One learned, as a result, to girder their steel at a moments notice. And steel came in many forms.

With Crowley it was a smile, a shrug, a clever turn of phrase, a motley of progressively convoluted bullshit what left the receiver of said excrement blinking and uncertain as to whether their queries had been answered at all.

In that moment, Crowley had barely strength with which to half heartedly muster his shields. What little he clung to was all but obliterated by the thing he held now in his trembling hands.

Aziraphale's wallet, the Frequent Diners Club card banished from the plastic photo sheathe and in its place, the picture Crowley himself had taken of the two of them together at the Ritz. Their very first meal of what was that; the first day of the rest of their lives.

"You've been stalking my social media, haven't you?" He said, not sounding nearly as cool as he had been intending. He was choking up some; shields well and truly dragging along the ground beside his hypothetical feet.

"Yes. I have." Aziraphale said, without a hint of shame concerns the matter. Something which warmed Crowley's heart for hearing it. "And... if such a thing should please you, I would be happy, with your assistance on the matter, to create a..." He lifted one brow enquiringly. "- the Facebook account?"

"Facebook, not _the_ Facebook." Crowley said, still holding onto the wallet and staring contentedly at the photograph within the plastic window. Aziraphale could ever so lightly flap the tip of one of his manky wings and it would have knocked him clean off his feet, nothing surer. "Why do you want an account? Didn't think social media was really your thing."

"It's not." Aziraphale confessed, internally shuddering at the prospect of engaging with all that puerile twenty-first century folderol. _Desperate times._ "But I can see from what you put into those posts that you are... you're proud of me. You're proud of _us._ " He set his hand to the underside of Crowley's wrist; passed the pad of his thumb over the vein lines there. "I... I don't want you to ever have to feel that things are... _complicated_ between us." He witnessed Crowley's brows lifting meaningfully at this. Threading the connection. "I would be proud to share in that with you, my dear. To share what we have. Photographs... certain memories." They both tittered at this one. "Times shared. To perhaps brag a little. Flaunt, as you might say."

"I really am good at flaunting." Crowley said, somewhat pointlessly. They both knew he could pull of a flaunt with such proficiency it would send a Victoria Secrets Runway model to shamefully binge eat three orange juice soaked cotton balls in her dressing room.

Crowley passed the wallet back, mustered his convictions somewhat and then leant in to plant a quick kiss to Aziraphale's lips. "Thanks. You know." He shrugged his shoulders articulately. The angel just smiled to see it. He was accustomed to the awkwardness.

"Just... out of curiosity," He did ask, tickled somewhat by the way in which Crowley was thrumming his fingertips against his bottom lip as though he might have been playing the flute. Obviously preoccupied by the still very new sensation of sharing a kiss. "What on earth did the young lady at the front desk mean when she said that someone might steal you out from under me?"

Crowley pushed the lenses of his glasses down, flashing Aziraphale a look what comprised equal parts amusement and what he could only hope, might pass for flirtatious. If history had taught him one thing, it was that he was notoriously stunted so far as successfully conveying romantic intentions were concerned.

"What do you suppose it means?" He asked, smirking to see the penny literally drop in Aziraphale's innoxious little mind.

"Oh." The angel opined with an ever so embarrassed smile. Crowley indulged himself by stroking his thumb and fingers down either side of that wonderfully charming expression. It was a strange thing. His heart was still pounding in his chest but he felt more at ease and at peace then he could ever remember being.

The door was open.

He might have spent longer still just standing there, awash with the near debilitating feelings of happiness coursing through him. But there would be time for that later. Time in all the world, in fact. Right now, there was work to be done.

"Come on. Let me finish showing you around." He slid his fingers down off of Aziraphale's chin and stepped around him to make his way back towards the door. He chuckled to see the somewhat confused look the angel directed at him. "Oh yeah. Don't go thinking just because we made up and you lay a wet one on me means you're home free. You're still signed up for the day, sweetheart."

"Oh. Yes. Of course." Flustered, Aziraphale scooped up the armful of clothes he had left on the kitchen table and trailed Crowley out of the room. He found his eyes drifting to follow the sway of the demons hips as he walked.

The uniform wasn't exactly what you would call aesthetically pleasing, but Crowley still somehow managed to make it look good. Which wasn't saying much. This was a creature what could make a wet hessian sack look good. In fact, if his memory was serving correctly, Crowley had once been forced to wear a hessian sack for... oh, who the Hell really knew when it came to someone like Crowley? He had just as likely done it for his own amusement as for any other more meaningful reason.

 _One hardly needs a clever turn of phrase,_ Aziraphale thought, _when they've got legs up to their face, the mind of an Aristotelian genius and cheekbones what could very well carve a sculpture of themselves._

 _A tight little bottom hardly hurts matters either_ , he mused, taking note of the way in which Crowley's was swishing back and forth in front of him and getting a good solid jab from the celestial failsafe's as a result. _Oh, this hardly seems fair. The sooner I can flex out these mental muscles, all the better. One shouldn't expect a slap to the back of the wrist every time one takes notice of a backside such as Crowley's. I'll be brain damaged, if that's the way it's going to play out._

Unaware of Aziraphale's internal struggle, Crowley wove his way towards the laundry room, stopping off at certain points along the way to point out things of particular interest and to introduce "Alex" to some of the other workers and residents.

He seemed in a particularly buoyant mood, Aziraphale observed, which was an emotion he did not often affiliate with what was a customarily curmudgeony demon. He had a smile on his face the whole time, even when just passing quietly through unoccupied spaces. Every so often he would flick a glance Aziraphale's way, do something particularly endearing such as bite the corner of his lip, before looking away again. A gesture ever so uniquely self-conscious and vulnerable.

Crowley was a creature who, in all the long time Aziraphale had known him, appeared to be quite as certain of his place in the world as a tree is aware of its place in the ground. To see him rendered so completely self-aware and nervous was both endearing and... empowering. It was a suitable turn about play, really; for all the times Crowley had unnerved him in the past. Aziraphale could hardly help but enjoy the unfamiliar position of being the one who was in control. The one with the power to sway.

* * *

"Oh, I've got to introduce you to Sylvia." Crowley was saying, breaking Aziraphale out of his thoughts as they rounded up on a nondescript door in the equally as nondescript hallway. "Lovely old dear."

"Oh, yes?"

"Yeah. Got a cute nickname for me and everything." Crowley rapped a knuckle against the door before easing it open a bare inch. He aligned his suspiciously smirking face with the gap he had made and called out: "Hey Sylvs! How ya doing today?"

The response was so prompt Aziraphale might have supposed that the unseen resident had been expecting the knock. There was a shrill scream of, _"FUCK OFF, FAGGOTTS!"_ rounded off by what was incontestably a bedpan, thankfully empty, being pitched against the far side of the door. The door which Crowley slid neatly shut, unperturbed by a greeting what might have sent a more sensitive person quivering into group therapy and swanned off back down the hall, chuckling happily to himself as he went.

"Ahh... she's a lamb, that one."

Aziraphale, eyelids pinned back tightly in his skull, pondered as to whether his ears might have been due a syringing.

"Did-did she just call us...?"

"Yeah. It's an endearment. Great gal. The other day she actually hauled off and pitched her wet napkin at me. Missed by about _that_ much." Crowley used his thumb and index finger to indicate a space in which even a malnourished nat might have difficulty navigating. "She'd be a heck of a bowler if Hell ever got round to putting together that cricket team they've been banging on about. Oh. Just a minute."

He paused, setting his hands out front of himself and smiling in what Aziraphale thought to be a somewhat creepily munificent manner as an elderly woman in a paisley dress was guided down the hall in their direction. Crowley waited until she was about five or so feet away before speaking.

"Hey there Josie. How you doing today, pet?"

 _Pet?_ Aziraphale thought, pulling a face at Crowley who did not pay it the slightest lick of attention. _Just when did he go and get all smarmy and saccharine? Outside of addressing one of his Hellish superiors, that is?_

The elderly woman smiled in a way which even an angel could attest to as being predatory. She didn't seem to pick up on anything being out of sorts concerns Crowley's tone, so Aziraphale surmised that it was his having known the demon as long as he had what rendered his suddenly affable poise as unnerving.

"Better for seeing you, dear." Said Josie, who looked to Crowley as a hungry dog might eye the fridge in which it knew that its food was kept, right before lending their unclipped paw to the side of the stainless steel. Aziraphale experienced a strange and sudden urge to unhitch his wings and wrap them about Crowley in a protective cacoon; being far too readily acquainted with this woman's manner of expression and knowing it entirely to match that which he himself wore when about to dig his fork into a wedge of cheese cake.

"Josie, Miranda, (Aziraphale surmised this to be the name of the worker who was supporting the aforementioned resident) this is Alex." Crowley, patently unconcerned with his near acquaintance with metaphorical devouring, gestured to the angel, who managed as always to bring a smile into what he felt was an otherwise strained expression. "He's going to be working in the kitchen today."

"Hello Miranda. Josie. Lovely to meet you." Aziraphale said in way of greeting. Josie pinched her eyes yet tighter still; inviting ever the more murders of crows feet into the corners and stared at Aziraphale as though he were perched on a distant foggy moor, as opposed to the six or so feet away that he actually was.

"Oh... well don't you have the most beautiful eyes." She remarked, to which Aziraphale immediately softened.

"Oh, isn't that kind." He murmured, exchanging a glance with Crowley who flattered him all the further with an approving nod. Perhaps this Josie was not quite so rapacious as he had earlier assumed. "Thank you, my dear lady."

"And so fat!"

Aziraphale did his utmost to affect poise which he might have marshalled all the more effectively if not for Crowley's barely smothered snickers off somewhere to the left. "Oh. Yes, thank you."

"And your nose... it's very big, isn't it?"

"Please, my dear. You may stop with the compliments whenever you like."

"Come on now Josie." Said Miranda, who looked every bit as amused as Crowley but going to much greater strains to stifle it. "Alex needs to be getting to work."

" _Watch your arse with this one._ " Crowley hissed from the side of his mouth. Aziraphale glimpsed movement from the corner of his eyes and saw the demon swish his hands back in behind himself, fanning them out to cover his bottom.

"Cover my-?" He had not been quick enough and as such had rendered himself the recipient of a prize in the form of Josie laying her palsied hand sharply to the curve of his right buttock. Aziraphale's eyes bulged for the second most time in five minutes, his mouth dropping open so that it was quite as wide and as round as the bottom of a tea cup. Crowley glanced back over his shoulder, smiling like a snake.

"Didn't even try for me today. She must like you."

"Yes. In spite of my being fat and having a big nose." Aziraphale permitted himself the slightest of grouches whilst rubbing at the stinging patch on his bottom. He had supposed geriatrics to lack a certain strength, giving the natural degradation of their bones and muscles. Why then did so many of them in the Grange Estate have a wrist strength what might have rivalled a single male university student in the prime of video game preoccupation, telephone device texting and chronic masturbatory practices?

"Don't let it worry you." Crowley, chuckling still as he continued his cheerful saunter up alone the senescent hallway. "She just talks a lot of faff, that one. Told me, first time we met, that I had a 'mean mouth'. Can you believe it?" He lowered his glasses just enough to throw a wink back over his shoulder. "Right about you having pretty eyes though."

"Oh, hush." Aziraphale said, though the look they passed between them now was predicated by the understanding that he had been not so secretly pleased to hear it. The moment stretched a little and Crowley was visited once more by the urge to press himself into Aziraphale's arms. Seek his kiss, let their passions potentially catapult them through the thin, plaster rendering bordering the halls with much the same tenacity as _Papier Mache_ clings to the outside of an economy brand balloon. He felt very professional for resisting it. Less happy, mind. But professional.

There was a lot to be said for being professional. He could not quite recall at that moment why it was in fact a good thing. (Good things actually mattering. How was that for a turn about of the books?)

A suitable distraction came in the form of a door number he was genuinely pleased to wander up on. He tapped his knuckles smartly to the festy, swamp green painted wood; a colour that some frontal lobe impaired interior designer must have convinced themselves, and equally itinerate others, was a soothing colour when viewed by the oft deteriorating eyes of England's aging population.

"Gotta introduce you to Gretchen. Gretchen's the best. You remember Gretchen?"

Aziraphale felt the unfamiliar strain creep on up into his otherwise warm and genuine smile again. "Yes. I recall." He said, remembering Gretchen all too keenly as the charge who Crowley had whisked off to the Ritz, had danced with at said Ritz. The Gretchen who spoke French; Aziraphale's incontestably least favourite language. (Not out of any anachronous feelings of distaste so far as France was concerned, of course. But for the simple fact that it was the language he did, for whatever the reason, find the very most difficult to wrap his tongue around).

"Don't tell the others, but she's my favourite." Crowley used his fist now to produce a louder knock, before opening the door with what Aziraphale took to be the utmost care and consideration. It did fracture through some of the inconversant feelings of malcontent Aziraphale was nursing; to see the demon acting so courteously. "Gretchen? Better throw your clothes on love, I've got a man with me who's never seen a naked woman before!"

Aziraphale scoffed, possessing no pride in the matter but hardly in the practice of denouncing the truth of it. "You fail to recall a certain garden in which I was partly charged with the watching over of a pair of very much naked humans. Let us say nothing of the years following. 39 AD springs to mind..."

Crowley hissed air sharply from between his teeth. Of course there was none, sans the collective majority of the twentieth and twenty-first century what was as proficient with the oversaturation of the visceral senses as there had been Emperor Caligula. It had been too much, even where Crowley was concerned. There were only so many orgies you could politely decline the invitation of before you rendered yourself a target of political unrest. Though Aziraphale had enjoyed the influx of new exotic eateries and their even more exotic fair. The oysters alone had been almost worth the up skirting.

"Good point." He acquiesced, easing himself in around the door jam and stepping into Gretchen's room. The bed was neatly made and her wheelchair was set still to the right of it. This struck Crowley as odd, because Gretchen was not able to leave the room without the assistance of her wheelchair. He checked the bathroom quickly, because she could hobble on in there without any help (and was often stubborn enough to do so) but this was empty as well.

"Um... look, just need to check something." He said, for the first time that morning properly focused on his workplace duties. He gestured for Aziraphale to follow him and made tracks for the nurses station.

A woman named Rhonda had been put in charge of that particular section of the ward that day and it was she what swept her eyes a little curtly towards Crowley as he rounded up. She was one of the few there who hadn't warmed to him over the past two months; little that he could care sans universal approval. Plenty the more dangerous and more limb rendering capable people what held him in contempt. What was one little human female whose greatest physical offense was in somehow managing to render her coral pink lips into a remarkable effigy of a frightened cats arsehole?

"Rhonda. Hey. Nice lip balm." Crowley's attempts at smarming something other than an erstwhile sigh from the woman bombed with ever the same dedication to insufficiency as 'Peter Max' itself. "Look, just wanted to check in on Gretchen. She wasn't in her room. Do we know if she took morning meds, or not?"

"You weren't told in handover?" Rhonda continued to fetter annoyance into every task she was undertaking with the somewhat more professional proficiency of a sausage maker. Interacting with Crowley appeared to be particularly high today on her list of 'Things I really can't be bolloxed with and wouldn't be bolloxed with, even if it were in my pay cheque to be bolloxed with. "All that fuss with Jeanie's baby and work flies right on out the window." She granted him the somewhat begrudged courtesy of glancing up from her game of _Farm Life_ -something or rather. Crowley hadn't really been meaning to catch it. "Gretchen started experiencing chest pains during the night."

Crowley felt something cold claw at his own chest. Something dimly familiar to what he had experienced when rocketing up to Aziraphale's bookshop only to find it on fire.

"Oh."

"She was taken to emergency and they currently have her in for cardiac observation."

Crowley was aware of Aziraphale having pressed a hand to his arm, just where a bicep might otherwise have been. He wanted to reach up and take his fingers between his own; anchor himself down a little in the wake of the unaccustomed concern he had been feeling. He didn't dare. Not with one of his errant detractors blinking their fake (partway peeling) eyelashes up at him.

"Is she okay?"

Rhonda could not have looked more the exhausted by the line of questioning than if she had been the United States President fielding enquiries about unsolicited political pay rises and personal thoughts of female reproductive rights. "We'll know more shortly. Rita will be ringing in regularly to touch base. The hospital advised they would be in contact themselves if there were any changes for the worse."

"Well, is any one with her?" Crowley himself had started to feel entirely like one of those journalists that simply refused to avow their line of questioning, in spite of the Presidential security teams visual assurances that they really ought to just fuck off. "She doesn't have any next of kin. I could go in?"

"Boundaries, Anthony."

"She might be frightened by herself." Anthony J. Crowley could give a flying rodents hairy left bollock as to whether boundaries might present an issue or otherwise. He had grown fond of Gretchen in the time he had spent in the Grange. She had been kind of like he imagined his own mother might have been; if the Almighty had not been the otherwise closest approximation. He did however fancy his own hypothetical mother to have been far the more mouthy, cheeky and crotchety. Just like Gretchen.

"This is not the first time that this has happened." Rhonda said with the testy tone of one whom was hankering to get their simulated cows back to munching whatever simulated straw they might well have needed to garner the next collection of simulated farmers tokens. "Gretchen is very practiced at it by now, I can assure you. Now, if you want to visit her in your own time, that's your decision, but right now you are on the clock and we need you focused. Plenty more people that still need your help right here and now."

"It's all right, dear." Aziraphale said supportively, rubbing Crowley's arm through the sleeve of his work shirt. The material 'crinkle-crunkled' beneath the pressure. "We can pop in to visit her after you finish your shift, if you like."

"... okay. Yeah, I got it." It was difficult to give someone a pointed look when you were deliberately attempting to keep your eyes hidden, but Crowley attempted to all the same. "Can you let me know as soon as you hear anything?"

"That's what I do." Said Rhonda with a differential grunt, returning her attention to far the more important matters. Crowley left her to her computer generated manure and duck spawning duties (thought not without first a snapping of his fingers what rendered her simulated chickens unable to lay eggs) and turned and marched away from the desk, his thoughts and emotions racing with an array of things he was only used to being affiliated with Aziraphale. Well... not so strong as that, of course. The worry though. The gnawing at the corners of his mind...

"Are you all right?" Aziraphale asked, trapping along in his wake. His tone was as caring and soft as it most usually was and Crowley felt such a resplendent surge of gratitude for the angel that he almost turned on the spot and buried himself right on up in the tattered waistcoat a while.

But because he was Crowley, he shelved the desire with the practice of one whom had long since attained a level of skill aspired to by world class professionals and omitted an ever so refined ' _pfft_ ' of the lower lip.

"Yeah. Yeah I'm fine. Besides, she's right, old Rhonda. Still plenty more folks round here needing me fightin' fit. Best be getting you over to the laundry room." He smirked over his shoulder at the angel's tranquil, very soon to be rather rankled, expression. "Whip you out of those duds."

* * *

**~X~**

The phone in Aziraphale's bookshop had been ringing off of the hook much of the morning. Some of these calls were as the result of some rather disgruntled clientele who might have been seeking out and or anticipating the arrival of a certain order. They might have left a message, but Aziraphale had never deigned to purchase an answering machine. His phone itself was far too antiquated to have a voice mail system installed and so, a few select and very much likely pretentious bibliophiles were left wanting. Something any frequent purveyors of A.Z Fell & Co's 's really ought to have anticipated going in. This was a man who all but disappeared in between the tiny spaces of his bookshelves in a bid to avoid having to sell any of the tomes what rested upon them.

The other calls had been from the likes of two increasingly frustrated angel's; who had gone through so many magically conjured coins that the public phone booth into which they had forcibly squeezed themselves, had begun to lean suspiciously to one side.

But of course, Aziraphale was in no position to be answering his phone. He was in an altogether different position. A pants free position.

Well, at least until he had pulled on the pair of which he had been provided, that is.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I realized just last night what a truly privileged position I am in when it comes to my husband. He's so wonderfully supportive around my writing fanfiction, even when I turn into an absolute beast whilst writing it.
> 
> He never uses it against me, gets stuck into me about it or insist that I ever stop or do something original. He's very chill like that, and apparently, this is not the same treatment that a lot of other people receive from their partners when writing fanfiction. 
> 
> Which genuinely breaks my heart, because yes; fanfiction can be a time and energy consuming hobby. It can also make us sad, tired, frustrated and it can even be demoralizing at times. But we stick at it because we have a story we would like to share. It makes us happy, in our own weird way. And we LOVE writing. We love expanding upon worlds and characters that we feel a passion for. We wanna breathe a bit more life into this world, keep the wheels spinning just that little while longer.
> 
> I feel very fortunate for a lot of things. I'm fortunate I have a husband who is relaxed and supportive around my hobbies. I'm fortunate not to be part of a toxic fandom. And I'm very fortunate to have such lovely readers :)
> 
> If you enjoyed and feel comfortable letting me know why, have at that comments box. Or groin-kick that Kudos button right in its Human Testicles. Thanks as always for your time, lovely people and I hope to see you in the next update!
> 
> All my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	24. Or, in which Hell's walls narrow more by the moment.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There were so few pleasures in Hell. It was home. But it was still the veritable arsehole in the wider tableau of the collective body of the universe. 
> 
> Every tiny aspect of Hell was marked by some infinitesimal degree of frustration. Pipes only just repaired would split and take once more to viscous oozing. Vitamin D levels were always in decline. The halls were always more crowded than a shopping mall the weekend before Christmas. There was even the same ratio of prams: only in Hell they were filled with empty, tetanus laden tin cans and balls of tangled yarn. All of which squealed like frustrated infants overdue a bottle feed and would sometimes randomly upend themselves, so that you would trip on an rogue can on an escape mission and end up hurtling arse over tit and busting out an otherwise useful vertebrae.
> 
> This was the way it had always been. And Hastur had always been irritated by it. But that even of itself was quite simply the norm. You found your means to get by. You griped, you hissed, you took it out on a convenient Disposable were one within arms reach.
> 
> You got by.
> 
> Hastur was finding it difficult lately, to get by...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back everybody :) I hope you all had an absolutely wonderful New Years! In a not at all relevant note that I still intend on sharing, I will be levelling up tomorrow to age thirty-three and in the spirit of getting older (though, with any luck, never the more mature) I aim to get a whole mess of updates out to you guys in the one go!
> 
> In the birthday spirit, I have nothing in the way of a Good Omen's-ervation to supply to you today, gentle readers; simply a continuation of the story! Thanks as always to all you wonderful human beings for sharing this journey with me; for the kudos, the bookmarking, the time spent reading what I put out there! I hope you enjoy the updates (those of you who are newer readers) and to those of you guys still waiting on the new stuff, all I can say is that I am writing it and by the time the subdividing is done, it should be all geared to be posted!

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**The Grange Estate Nursing home - London Suburbia ** _

Aziraphale had once set fire to Crowley's induction cook top trying to make an omelette.

It had been the morning following the Armage-Don't-even-bother. He and Crowley had, by that stage, already effected a successful body switch and the latter had left to check on matters at the assumed to be gutted bookshop. Aziraphale, in rather the poorer state of mind pertaining to aforementioned nihilistic annihilation of what little he held dear, hadn't bothered with the banal task of sobering up the night before and was forced then to nurse the consequences.

He was headachy and peckish. Nothing like a full stomach ( _Well, Crowley's full stomach_ ) to take the edge off of hangovers and tumultuous heartbreaks alike.

He had gotten distracted. He had been in Crowley's body, after all. There had been quite a bit to be distracted by. The ridiculous length of the legs, the altered centre of gravity, the equally absurd tightness of the pants. The...design of the body, overall. Crowley's organs would interject on occasion with some well rather worrying noises. His kidneys in particular seemed to complain more than an elderly woman waiting in line for her prescription at the discount drug store. Silly demon didn't sober up enough obviously, and now his human body was starting to wear some of the long term side effects.

Aziraphale remembered spending far too long with what you would suppose to be more innocuous observations. Gazing at Crowley's nails, the length and shape of his long fingers, the slender intonation of his wrists. He caressed the knuckles, the backs of each hand. Examined his jaw line, noting how much more definition it possessed whence compared to his own.

He might have admired further still, if not for the scent of burned egg reaching his now the far more sensitive nose and that of the even more sensitive vent of the kitchen adjacent smoke detector.

Delicately put; Aziraphale was not a good cook. Neither, for that matter, was Crowley. They were the sorts of creatures who, over their vast centuries spent on earth, preferred for their food to be prepared for them; giving time over instead for the predominant focus of enjoyment and conversation. One of them might in fact have been a good cook with some practice; who's to say? Neither seemed particularly fussed with attempting to find out.

Aziraphale, such as with most things, preferred to hand over control of his meals to the professionals; so as to ensure he would have the most venerable experience possible whence dining. And Crowley was hardly what you might call domicile. A kitchen, to him, was a place where one went to fetch a glass and pour whatever was chilling from the fridge into said glass. Not to hang around flicking spices into bubbling cauldron's, spin a whisk about some dooey concoction and fluff oven fumes into your nostrils whilst espousing your fingertips to your lips and 'mwaa-ing' your pretentious, culinary prowess.

In so saying, when Aziraphale emerged from the laundry room, partway draped in the ever more brittle version of the Grange Estate's cooks uniform, he could not have looked more the disturbed than if he were on the verge of an unscheduled and entirely unappreciated proctology exam. He expressed such concerns to Crowley, misaligning his buttons a number of times in the process of doing so.

"There's a lot riding on this. This is your workplace and your colleagues clearly think highly of you and I shouldn't want to let you down. Even by association."

"Oh, shush, you couldn't let me down if you tried." Crowley said softly, smiling to see the angel in such a considerately flustered state. "Even if you poisoned them I should think it a remarkable achievement."

"Well, that's precisely what I will be trying to avoid, thank you!" Aziraphale blurted, taking note of the mess he'd made of his jacket and just about ripping all the buttons out from the cheaply stitched seams as he fussily separated the halves. Crowley caught a brief glimpse of pristine white singlet ensconced across a broad chest and round belly and allowed himself room in which to enjoy it. What the fuck, he was obviously allowed now.

"You could just miracle up the food to something of a substandard level. That's what I've been doing."

Aziraphale paused a moment, four buttons in and enjoying somewhat more success in fitting them where they did in fact require fitting. "You've been using magic to improve the residents meals?" He asked.

"Just... improve the taste, make it a little richer, that sort of thing." Said Crowley, differentially. He was still a little distracted by that earlier glimpse. A glimpse that was helping in formulating a number of tentative future focused fantasies which would serve to keep him occupied in his otherwise more reflective of moments. "Oldies have been loving life since I've been here, I can tell you that."

"Well... well, it's a very kind thought, darling," Aziraphale said, doing up the last of his buttons and straightening his collar. He failed to witness Crowley's face all about melting into his shoulder at being referred to as 'darling'. "But I think you had best stop."

The demon could not have looked more the confused then if he had been asked fashion a fighter jet out of instant custard. "Why?"

"There's a reason as to why food is blander in places such as this." Aziraphale explained, straightening out his sleeves and adjusting what aspects of his 'uniform' required adjusting. "Elderly humans have specific health related concerns, dietary requirements. Aged organs, high blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, heart conditions, so on and so forth. Rich food could potentially exacerbate any number of those things. "

"Oh. I didn't even think about that..." Crowley appeared genuinely concerned for the degree of harm he might have, for the once, unintentionally perpetuated. Aziraphale looked at him sympathetically, understanding full well that for perhaps the first time in his life, Crowley had set out to try and do something kind in the service of humanity, only to have it seemingly thrown back in his face.

He took the demon's hand up between his own and gave it a gentle squeeze.

"Perhaps just leave the food alone for now." He offered a loving smile, warming the further still at the look of pained consternation crossing Crowley's face.

"But they must've gotten used to the food tasting better..."

"Well, they'll be in for a very rude awakening once I'm set to work in that dreadful closeted little kitchen." Aziraphale groaned, rolling his eyes back in his head. "The stupid situations I land myself in-"

"-never cease to amaze, angel." Crowley rounded off, keeping a hold of Aziraphale's hand still. He passed his thumb over one of the knuckles; much as he had that night so many months back when he had been grooming the angel's wings. Geez, to think what condition they must have been after going so long without attention. "I'm starting to think myself properly flattered to see what effort you've gone to, just to have a conversation with me. You could have dropped in the sandwich and bailed me up in the hall, rather than Miracling a stomach bug into the poor cook and spending the rest of the day poisoning pensioners."

"Well I knew that if I was assigned to work here that I'd be on site all day and you would be hard pressed to avoid me." Aziraphale gave a somewhat guilty glance off to the side. "If I had known we might have resolved our concerns so quickly, perhaps I wouldn't have bothered."

"This is hardly the _Bastille_. And you're hardly beholden to Heaven, anymore. You could just use another miracle. Have the cook show back up and take your leave." Crowley pouted his lips in what the angel took to be a provocatively teasing manner, neither of them the least aware of the aforementioned cook currently being hooked up to a drip and in no fit state to do anything other than pray for a quick and merciful death. "Promise I won't get crabby with you between now and close of business."

"As you said, we don't quite know how much magic we may have left to us, Crowley. I don't want to be wasting it on things that... may not be one hundred percent life or death." He passed his hand briefly down the length of the demons arm. It was getting easier by the moment, the touching. It did in fact make him feel a fool for having waited so long. "Besides... you were brave enough to join up with an unknown work place and put yourself out of your comfort zone. Surely I am capable of giving it at least one day." He took Crowley's fingers between his own. Gave them a squeeze which rent more pleasure through him than barbs. "And I could hardly abandon you. Not when you're waiting on news of your dear Gretchen."

"Good timing on your part." Said Crowley ironically, slipping his hand out of Aziraphale's and using both then to straighten the halves of the angel's shirt. The shirt was as straight as it really rather needed to be, but that meant nothing to a demon what needed to be close and needed still an excuse for being so. "It's all right. The cooking stuff, I mean. We'll work it out."

"You'll help?"

"Of course I'll help. Can't have you killing off all my oldies, after all. I'd have to find another job." Crowley made use of the shirt halves as something of a winch, easing himself in, head down until the very last moment in which he lifted his chin and glanced his lips quickly against Aziraphale's. He went a little red still, which amused an angel who, in spite of the stinging of those terrible ethereal nettles, felt somewhat the more at earthly peace with the act. "Still... trying to get used to that."

"I know." Said Aziraphale, absolving himself somewhat of his earlier urges by glancing his hand to the curve of Crowley's hip. It might well have been a bad idea. The predominantly tender touch beckoned ever closer a more primitive desire; one which urged him to ease that hand about, take more than just that hip in the clutch of his palm and fingers. To take and to squeeze...

Aziraphale shook the thought away. "Though I do find I'm rather not... opposed to it."

"Small mercy, that." Crowley looked much as though he might have sensed to where the angels' mind had briefly strayed but chose not to play into it. He stepped back, glanced his eyes up and down Aziraphale's crisply smocked body and snickered indulgently to himself. "You look like one of those little cartoon chef's they make kitchen ornaments out of. Just need that moustache you pencil on for your magic tricks."

"You are so not worth it." Aziraphale grumbled, aware that even in the midst of all that grumbling, that he was sincerely in one of the least irritated moods in which he had cause to find himself. The situation was ludicrous, as were so many of the situations in which he had inevitably landed himself. But something altogether wondrous had come of this particular ridiculous situation. A shifting forwards of circumstances, an encapsulation of feelings and of opportunities what had been held at bay for many thousands of years. It was all very new and very frightening and very much needed.

"I _am_." Crowley drawled, smirking as he smacked his hand to Aziraphale's rump and sauntered off back towards the kitchen area. "Come on. Let's get your paperwork sorted and shift your butt into the kitchen."

Aziraphale followed, rubbing at his buttocks for what was the second time in a so far short a morning. He hadn't minded the smack from Crowley, however. Certainly a great deal nicer (and less violent) than the one he had received from Josie.

* * *

**~X~**

_**A dank office somewhere in the bowels of Hell... ** _

Hastur was a demon of relatively simple needs and wants.

That was one of the things he liked so much about the fourteenth century. Any century, in fact, before the invention of that old bugaboo; electricity. Everything had gotten so much more needlessly complicated after that.

Live wires. Cars. Telephones. Internet. Indoor plumbing. Humans, it seemed, were just never satisfied with letting sleeping dogs lie. They always had to go and throw a spanner in the works.

Just when you thought you had gone and gotten your head around one new development, the sneaky bastards would go and trot out another, ever the more convoluted one. It was hard not to take it personally.

Hastur had his intermittent missions to earth, sowing discord and malcontent where required. He felt he took rather a more hands on approach then Crowley, which was hardly a surprise given recent developments. He had never lingered long; perhaps only to throw back a celebratory drink or buy a pouch of tobacco. Two of the human inventions he could actually get behind.

Hastur's needs were simple. Life, such as it was, was easier that way.

If there was a job needed doing, you did it. He took pleasure in the work that he did. If Crowley was a demon what derived pleasure from acts of mischief and quiet subterfuge, Hastur took enormous delight in the malignant, the cruel and the oft times dramatic.

There were so few pleasures in Hell. It was home. But it was still the veritable arsehole in the wider tableau of the collective body of the universe.

Every tiny aspect of Hell was marked by some infinitesimal degree of frustration. Pipes only just repaired would split and take once more to viscous oozing. Vitamin D levels were always in decline. The halls were always more crowded than a shopping mall the weekend before Christmas. There was even the same ratio of prams: only in Hell they were filled with empty, tetanus laden tin cans and balls of tangled yarn. All of which squealed like frustrated infants overdue a bottle feed and would sometimes randomly upend themselves, so that you would trip on an rogue can on an escape mission and end up hurtling arse over tit and busting out an otherwise useful vertebrae.

This was the way it had always been. And Hastur had always been irritated by it. But that even of itself was quite simply the norm. You found your means to get by. You griped, you hissed, you took it out on a convenient Disposable were one within arms reach.

You got by.

Hastur was finding it difficult lately, to get by.

Too much time up top. It was the comparative factor what got you at days end. Grass is always greener, and all that.

Thing is, if you didn't bother with going and taking a look at said grass, you wouldn't know any better.

And Hastur would be the very last to admit it, but he found that he had rather enjoyed the past few months. The back and the forth from earth. The reconnaissance.

Even the angels.

"You... feelin any different, ya think?" He asked Dagon, having found himself begrudgingly stationed with a bucket beneath yet another dripping pipe. She glanced up from the perpetually misaligned In-Tray on her desk; papers having been shoved in sideways, upside down and improperly filled out.

"After what?" She flicked her head vaguely towards the ceiling. "Bein' up there, you mean?"

Hastur grunted, because really, what more a confirmation was needed?

Dagon thought on it a while, rolling her shoulder about and listening to the ball joint crackle like a seashell being crushed under the heel of a boot.

"Feels... a bit claustrophobic, all of a sudden." She admitted, as another of the Ever-Void bumped against the corner of her desk and set her snow globe to dangerously wobbling. It never worked when she shook it, but she was fond of it all the same. A memento from a job in Portugal that she had rather enjoyed. It had worked then. Hell had seen fit to stall its inner workings before too long. Much as it degraded everything it touched. "Like being able to flex my elbows occasionally without bumping them into any of these twits."

She gave the Ever-Void a boot what sent them off in some other meaningless direction. They were a nuisance and a terrifying reminder as to how close some of them had been to have never regained their faculties at all. But you put up with them because, well, they were still family.

Hastur moved the bucket a near infinitesimal inch and was rewarded for his efforts with the contents of the ceiling mounted pipe expunging muck over the majority of the desk he had been attempting to protect. It was enough to make him want to rip the symbiotic toad clean out of his own skull. If he wasn't half convinced that doing so would have devastated most of his brain in the process.

"Mother of...!" He swept most of the indistinguishable goop free with his ratty trench coat sleeve, adjusting the angle of the bucket so it sat in just the right spot. "Never thought much of the place, be honest." He said, in reference to the human world. It was strange in and of itself; the want to talk about it. Stranger still to speak about it with anyone other than Ligur. They were a pair what had shared a mutual appreciation for malice and this was about as solid a foundation for a relationship what you might otherwise find in Hell. "But compared to here..." He sneered, giving his sleeve a shake and sending stinking droplets flinging to every far corner of the room. They splattered off of Ever-Void alike, who paid them about as much mind as a passing cool breeze. "Least they got something decent to drink up there."

"True." Dagon remarked, pretending, as demons were so prone to doing, not to care. She herself was thinking much the same thing, however. And something worse still. A... feeling that for a few precious moments she had come in out of the cold and had been standing by a warm fire. Only to have the fire snuffed out.

It was the angels, she had realized. They were awful and pompous and detestable, but their Heavenly presence brought with them that ephemeral warmth, which was softer and kinder. It had quenched something in her that felt ever so much in desperate need of nourishment. A tiny part of her, a part which she was quickly growing to loathe, was anxious to return up top and breathe in a little more of that addictive aura of their celestial counterparts.

It was like those terrible human cravings. Dagon could understand how such a thing could take hold. The aching, clawing need for just a sliver of that easement superseded all else; such that she was finding it more the difficult to sort what was already unnecessarily complicated piles of putrid smelling, seeping and sometimes spontaneously combusting paperwork.

Hastur took an indolent sniff of his unsullied jacket sleeve. He never washed it and he wasn't much one to bathe if he could help it. The cloying sent of that stupid Seraphim's cologne lingered in the threads of eviscerated material.

When he sniffed, he'd discovered, the small ache what he had developed in his chest went away. He saw a picture in his very unimaginative mind; a picture of the Earth, of the bar and of a good tasting drink. Of cigarette smoke and joint custody of already too small seat cushions and air that was sometimes fresh and streets in which you could walk on occasion without someone bumping up into you.

Of not needing to march from pillar to post with a blessed bucket out in front of you all the time.

He took another sniff. And quietly wondered to himself what Lord Beelzebub's next instructions would be.

Eternity was a long time to spend in Hell.

And even a demon with needs quite as simple as Hastur's, wasn't sure just how much more of it he could take.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I love fleshing out these characters :) Particularly Hastur, who I have such a overwhelming soft spot for. I think it was the wondrous shrieking he emitted when Ligur was killed, which cemented my undying love for eternity. Still makes me laugh every time I see that scene!
> 
> Feel as free to pop on over to the next update, dear readers! I hope to see you there! :)


	25. Or, of the sudden nature, of passing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To walk amongst the bustling of the busy cities. Eat at a thousand expensive, snooty and even the more romantic candle sundered restaurants. Hold hands in the streets, lean into one another whilst passing through the busy herds of humans otherwise going about their business. Flutter at the casino's, clear out the buffets, wrap arms about shoulders whilst staring out over ever changing and morphing views. Whether it was buildings, lakes, mountains, oceans, pines, beaches, whatever.
> 
> And the nights... when the darkness crept in and encapsulated all corners of whatever rooms they might then find themselves in, then perhaps...
> 
> Perhaps then your hands. Your hands upon and wended about my own. Pressed to the bare lines of my chest. The waylay of one another's curves and otherwise secret, untranslated spaces. Knowing and finding one another deeper still than even the softest spoken words might transgress...
> 
> Soft heady moans, fingertips tracing lines what beads of sweat had only just traversed, nails lending themselves to keening red trails along ribcages, hips and buttocks, kisses scented of red wine and champagne...
> 
> The feeling of you inside of me...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back, lovely readers! In recent times, I have joined up with r/fanfiction on reddit, where I've been learning a great deal in regards to improving my writing, and hopefully making this a better, more enjoyable read for you guys! It's been a very humbling experience, and I hope that I continue to improve all the time!
> 
> Part of the reason as to why this subdivision is taking longer than expected. I am editing as I am going along, trying to improve the story and get rid of all those things which can shit readers off. With the exception of my... boring writing... which I'm certain already shits readers off, but apart from that! All the other little annoying arse things that I can actually improve. I think I will always be boring, regardless of whatever work I put into a piece :P
> 
> Anyhoo, got another update for you, guys! Feel free so as to have a read and I will hopefully catch you on the far side! As always, if you have any questions or things you would like to point out, feel entirely free to fling them my way. I have about as much bite as a toothless sloth, and as much energy to boot, so please don't ever feel frightened to pull me up :)

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**The Grange Estate Nursing home - London Suburbia ** _

You might be forgiven for believing that Aziraphale and Crowley had in fact lived in something of domestic bliss for the better part of so many human appropriate years.

They certainly bickered as such. A bickering of which Crowley's colleagues found to be incomparably romantic and took then to wondering just when they themselves would stumble upon that same loving and comfortable dynamic in their own lives.

"You're cutting those chunks of carrot far too big." Aziraphale, crunchy uniform beset by a Thomas the Tank engine themed apron, now fancied himself acquainted enough with the cooking process to cast aspersions on Crowley's lacklustre technique. He found it came up wanting, so far as his now keen eye was concerned.

"They're not too big! They're fine." Crowley, having boggarted the indisputably more desired Stepford-wife-esque pink apron with complimentary frills, was starting to regret his offer to rescue Aziraphale for what he estimated to have been the three-thousandth time from self-induced embarrassment.

Aziraphale, he had long since decided, was just like all chef's everywhere; bossy, pompous and demeaning. He was glad he had snatched the pink apron off of him now. In spite of Aziraphale's repeated insistences that he was the more practiced at 'wearing frills'. _Well, this isn't the fifteen-hundreds any more, sir. And pink, like you said, really isn't your colour._

"You're going to end up choking these poor dears just like you do those innocent ducks at the park." Aziraphale looked the slightest bit squeamish, having just gouged some marks into the skin of a leg of lamb with an otherwise ineffectively dull knife. The lamb was to be prepared for the evenings meal, so time was rather the thankfully on his side.

He had already set down a layer of onions in the base of a baking paper lined oven tray and was currently rubbing a mixture of garlic, rosemary and salt and pepper into the stab marks. No, he could never cook his own food, he decided, swallowing back a gag that was almost about as meaty as the produce to which his rubber gloves were set. Preparing it was quite enough to sup him of whatever appetite he might otherwise have possessed.

"It's all just going to be boiled up and made soft anyway. Now stop nagging or I'll cut you."

Aziraphale paid this about as much mind as he might have done a knock from a Jehovah's witness. Though the Jehovah's witness was, by very definition of what they were, worlds more dangerous than Crowley could ever hope to be.

"Oh, you wouldn't."

"I bloody _would_." Said Crowley; grumpy, sullen, not even gesturing with the paring knife he held or being at all vaguely threatening with it.

They continued with their respective tasks in momentary silence. They were alone in the kitchen, Crowley having packed away all the groceries what had been earlier delivered and long since relieved of breakfast and washing duties. Appropriately enough, his set job for the day was to provide assistance to the cook; something of which his false credentials attributed to his being more than capable of doing. He had a food handling and health and hygiene certificate; both of which he had naturally miracled into being. He had sense at least to put on rubber gloves, which was about as far as his food preparation skill set naturally extended.

And, hey... not like there was anyone else was around to pass judgment on his very slow and very mediocre vegetable chopping methods. Other than Aziraphale. And Aziraphale was unequivocally just as crap at the task as he was.

Every once in a while one of the girls would see fit to drift in. They would pretend they were in there for some business or another. It was really just an excuse to snoop. Those who hadn't yet met 'Alex' used the opportunity to introduce themselves. Some were even polite enough to pretend as though a pairing what comprised the likes of Crowley and Aziraphale wasn't a visually jarring and seemingly unlikely prospect.

They all agreed that in spite of appearances, the couple were terribly romantic. Nothing said love quite like the threatening to slice someone from stem to stern whilst standing shoulder to shoulder over a leg of lamb and a medley of wilted sprouts and baby carrots.

Alice was very much looking forward to the staff parties. She hoped 'Anthony' would still be with them come Christmas time. 'Alex' would make a _perfect_ Father Christmas for their Secret Santa.

" _Baaa_." Crowley broke the silence with a sudden, seemingly pointed bleat. Aziraphale's hands flew up off of the prospective roast as though the fires of Hell had suddenly expunged themselves from the exsanguinated creatures pores.

"Oh, would you _please_ not do that! It wasn't funny the first time!"

"Just think..." Crowley said; his voice pining and malodorous. "Few days ago, that poor little chap was loving life. Kicking his back hooves up amongst the clover and the dandelions, the sun on his cherubic face-"

"Please stop, I'm _begging_ you!" It was barely ten o'clock in the morning and Aziraphale already felt like he needed a drink. He was ever the more tempted to appropriate that cupcake from the breakroom fridge and snaffle it down like a truffle hunting hog. Anything to take the edge off of the terrible glean of guilt he was currently experiencing.

"- next thing you know, steel rod to the frontal lob, _bang,_ mama sheep going ' _What happened to little Eduardo? Why he was here but naught a second ago_.' And now one of his once carefree little back hoofs is being drenched in garlic and rosemary and tenderized by one of God's very own supposedly beneficent angels."

Aziraphale wrenched a tea towel with such violence from the handles of the oven that the door jolted open an inch and used said article to then deliver a stout smack to Crowley's backside. "I said-" He punctuated his words with another few good smacks that ratcheted off of Crowley's back, bottom and thighs alike. "- _STOP THAT!_ "

" _ **Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the earth...**_ " Crowley sang, raising both hands towards the ceiling as though inviting down a divine light. He got another series of ever the sharper cracks from the towel for his efforts.

"This is hard enough as it is, dealing with a deceased animal, cut down before its' time!" Aziraphale whipped the towel over his shoulder, trying to maintain a stern demeanour as Crowley glanced his palms off of every stinging body part with a triumphant smile. "Oh, it's enough to make me never want to order lamb again. Poor..." His bottom lip gave the slightest, sentimental tremble. "... _poor_ little thing."

"Surprised you haven't tried to revive it yet." Crowley smirked, returning to his vegetable chopping duties with the look of one who was fully aware as to what dealing with a big hunk of meat was going to do to an angel. And had, of course, insisted on dealing with the vegetables anyway.

Hey, just because he was retired didn't mean he couldn't enjoy a bit of demonic bothering every once in a while. Keep the muscles toned and all of that.

"I feel it is perhaps a little beyond saving at this point." Aziraphale replied sarcastically, mustering some inner conviction and returning his hands to the lamb; a look on his face as though a ladle of bad wasabi had been slipped beneath his tongue. Crowley cast a, one might say, somewhat envious look at the piece of meat to which the angel's attentions were currently occupied.

"Don't see why you need to massage the thing. Bit of a moot point trying to relax it now."

Aziraphale twitched his head vaguely towards the cook book he had propped up in the corner of the meal prep station. He had found it beneath the kitchen bench, and though covered in grease stains, littered with dog ears what had splintered the paper and hailing from 1969, he still considered it more trustworthy than most any advice Crowley had been attempting to surreptitiously spoon feed him. "It's to make the skin crisp up or some nonsense."

"Feel like I'm the one that could make better use of your hands than a slab of dead meat." Crowley muttered, surprising himself just as much with the brazen words as Aziraphale. Aziraphale, who sighed in a way that set Crowley's heart to racing with panic and paused with his fingers slumped upon the rise of the lamb like a pair of swing dancing spiders having tapped out on the final set.

"Crowley-"

"Yeah. I'm hitting light speed, aren't I?" Crowley acknowledged, thinking that if nicking the tip off of one of his fingers might repair the faux paus, he would be willing to do so with only the slightest of ear drum shattering complaints.

"Rather." Aziraphale gave him a soft look; one hemmed by palpable apprehension. "I'm still... getting used to this. I'm on board, I'm just... I just need you to ease back a little. All right?"

"Of course. Sorry." Crowley felt almost faint with relief. It was still so terrifying; the thought that he might scare Aziraphale away for good. Might ruin yet that tentative progress what they had made so far. He needed to reign it in, or risk killing it on the vine. "I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. Well... I mean, I did about the lamb, but not about the, uh-"

Aziraphale held up a hand temperately. "I know and it's all right. I'm sorry if I'm quashing your enthusiasm, in turn." He petted his fingers tenderly to the line of Crowley's jaw; a reassurance enough to send the demon to about melting from the inside out. "I _will_ get there." He returned his focus to the lamb, which most certainly was not about to get cooked on its own. Thought for a moment of the considerations he had been mulling over both the previous night and this morning and decided to just go ahead and provide some further clarity concerns his feelings. Crowley was very likely in need of it, after all. "My dear, I was thinking... you know, I really think we ought to go on that trip. The one you mentioned before. See the world."

A piece of carrot was sent skittling along the floor; having slipped from beneath the edge of the parring knife. Crowley hadn't made the least attempt to prevent its escape. He was far too preoccupied with staring at Aziraphale with his maw gaping like a ceramic clown at a state fair.

"What... you mean it?"

"Well, we've been in London so long." It was hard not to smile, to see a demon who spent so many of his idle hours invested heartily in the assurance of his own 'coolness' appearing so childishly hopeful. "Times have changed. We could go anywhere. Paris for example. Visit the _Louvre_."

Crowley thought on this a moment and his brows lifted smartly away from the bridge of his glasses as equally an austere excursion came to the forefront of his brilliant mind.

"We could spit off of the top of the Eiffel Tower."

"Picnic at the _Jardin du Luxembourg_." Contributed Aziraphale, wrinkling his nose a little at Crowley's rather _avante garde_ suggestion. Oh, he would go along for the ride, of course, if Crowley insisted on such a juvenile venture but he was hardly about to partake himself. Someone might get killed from that height.

"Take in a show at the _Palais Garnier._ " Crowley suggested, and Aziraphale could tell, simply from the many years of association, that his eyes were brightening with excitement from behind his glasses. "Get well stewed trying to get through it without nodding off to sleep and snoring during the quiet sections."

"We could walk the _Pont Alexandre III_."

"Put a lock on that bridge; whatever it's called." Crowley snapped his fingers inconclusively. Somewhere off in the distance, the wires in Rhonda's computer had started to smoke suspiciously. "You know. The... bridge that people put... locks on."

"Oh, I think they stopped doing that."

"Did they?"

"Apparently the bridge was collapsing under the weight."

"Oh." Said Crowley thoughtfully. "... Well, that's sort of sweet. So much love it could sink a bridge. Poetic, really."

They shared a tentative, yet entirely appreciated romantic glance; perhaps both pondering just what six thousand years worth of love might weigh if put to the test. Crowley fancied it might very well be enough to sink whatever continent upon which the weighing was being conducted.

"We could visit the catacombs!" He interjected his own thoughts with another enthusiastic snap of the fingers. (A careful observer might yet take note of the small lick of flame erupting from the back of Rhonda's computer screen).

Aziraphale flinched at the reference, and with very good reason. Crowley had been instrumental in the design of the famous Catacombs of Paris; a design which, after his having shared the details with Aziraphale one chilly evening in 1773, had prompted the angel to devour two subsequent bottles of Gin (very popular at the time, much to his chagrin) in an effort to forget it.

Oh, Crowley had thought himself enormously clever with the whole garish affair, of course. He had even come up with the name _Barriere d'Enfer_ for the gate from which the ossuary was constructed. 'Gate of Hell' (extraordinarily on the nose, so far as Aziraphale was concerned).

Much like the M25 London Orbital motorway (to which Crowley had received a glowing commendation) the Catacombs of Paris had been something of a cheeky nod to the Mesopotamian deity _Ninnghishidda_ ; a being what was sometimes evoked in ancient occult practices and by edgy teenagers with too much time on their hands and too much black nail polish, platform boots and liquid eyeliner for both theirs and anyone else's good.

What none of these otherwise well (or rather unwell) meaning individuals failed to appreciate however, was that it was Crowley who was in fact the aforementioned _Ninnghishidda._ It had been a nickname given to him by some boggle eyed locals who had caught him transmuting out of his snake form and then attempting to convert a buckskin of water into something far the more preferable for consumption. Mesopotamia, in its heyday, had nothing in the way of a nightlife and very limited means of entertainment at any hour of the day really. Crowley had spent a great deal of his time there, drinking whatever fermented juices he'd been able to lay his lips to. Simply as a means to efface the otherwise all consuming _boredom._

The reverence of the primitive humans had been amusing at first and then, as the weeks had gone on and the trail of mystified persons behind him increased by the two to threefold, (to the fold so great he cared to stop counting it), ever the more irritating.

Admittedly, flipping a boulder at the otherwise well intentioned morons was a _little_ below the belt. But he had been in a foul mood. He was tired, thirsty, his hair was full of knots and braids that some of the disparate clingers on had wended through when he hadn't been paying close enough attention and he was fairly certain Mercury was in retrograde, which always made him feel particularly niggly. And really; company other than Aziraphale's could barely be tolerated for much longer than a few hours, before making him wish there was good, tall cliff with nice pointy rocks at the base of which he might saunter off into.

The catacombs of Paris replicated in near perfect detail (in so far as Crowley's memory could be trusted) the path he had taken in his efforts to shirk his would-be wide-eyed admirers across Mesopotamia. There was no power behind it; not like the low grade evil circumvented by the googolplex of pissed off drivers forced to rumble their way about the M25 on a much begrudged daily basis. The design of the Catacombs had been simply something that rather had amused Crowley; a pointed poke at things having otherwise requiring a secret meaning which was somehow more poignant than the overall sum of its parts.

That had of course been long before the design of the M25 and its alliteration to the Dark Priesthood of Mu set up shop in his Machiavellian little mind. Perhaps he had lost something of his sense of irony as he had gotten older, who's to say?

"Oh, no. _Really?_ " Aziraphale was groaning, having gone on a gleefully guided tour of the tombs in the times in which they were new and not finding it nearly so charming as Crowley seemed to insist that they were. It had smelt funny and it was dirty and cobwebby and... full of dead people. "Not those dreadful skull fringed catacombs, I fail to see just how you're so proud of that dreadful place."

"It's got an aesthetic." Crowley maintained; he himself having an appreciation of any aesthetic what comprised skulls, darkness, overall doom and gloom and clothing items what might be gleaned from a garage sale of a university student who had been a frequent purveyor of Hot Topic, in their teen years. "People love that sort of thing."

"It's spooky." Aziraphale contributed with a shudder. Crowley knew quite well just how Aziraphale felt about any place or locale that possessed so much as a snifter of 'spooky'. He had almost discorporated clean out of his skin whence attempting to navigate the Petrin Hill Mirror Maze in Prague, 1891 and that was simply from seeing his own reflection drastically contorted so that his eyes just about ballooned out of his skull. "I should think if we were going to Paris that we would potentially focus on traditionally _not_ spooky things."

"We would have a little bit of spooky, surely." Crowley grumbled, kicking the hunk of discarded carrot beneath the baseboard of the bench and returning to its mostly eviscerated companions upon the chopping board. "You got me going off to bloody picnic's and theatre shows, there's got to be room for something I would enjoy doing. It can't just all be about _you_."

"We could have dinner at _Le Meurice._ " Aziraphale suggested, with a look which said he considered this quite enough of a concession. He had that self-same expression of dilated pupils and rosy cheeks that he reverted to whenever the thought of 'crepes' entered his little flock-haired noggin. "Dance at _Le Carmen_."

Crowley gave an amused snort as he piled not-so carefully divided hunks of carrot into a small saucepan. "Don't know if the gavotte would really take off at _Le Carmen_ somehow, angel."

"Well... we'll plan ahead. Go in a couple of months. ... you could... teach me, by then." Aziraphale cast a little look Crowley's way. A visual appeal to interpret that 'could' as rather a more earnest 'please.' _'Please teach me. And please don't believe me when I make half... bottomed excuses as to why it would be a silly idea. Just persist. Please._ '

Crowley was attempting to carve a wedge of pumpkin into smaller, more manageable pieces. It was a dicey (no pun intended) endeavour and so he had missed the appealing expression on Aziraphale's face. Which was a shame, because he would have undoubtedly melted like butter whence left on the kitchen bench all day by an inattentive husband.

"To _ballroom_ dance?" The demon scoffed and then jerked back from the bench with a sharp hiss, having narrowly avoided bringing the knife down on his fingers as the pumpkin leapt violently from one side to the other. "Not so flash myself, truth be told, angel."

"But you know the steps." Aziraphale persisted, aware as he was, that most demons danced with a skill what was most readily rivalled by drunk Caucasian women attempting to make their way down a narrow hallway to the club lavatory. What demons lacked in rhythm however, they more than made up for in obnoxious enthusiasm; such that it was a rare for a demon, even the more supposedly reposed of them, to find a means to resist in getting down to boogie.

Crowley was _far_ from an exception. Aziraphale had once, much to his own horror, observed Crowley dancing to the point of actually giving himself a cardiac arrest in the 1970's. Unlike most of the humans who had been surrounding him at the disco, Crowley had not in fact taken any illicit substances (his last little foray in the 1960's being quite as much fun as he cared for) but had simply been up and dancing for over eight hours straight.

He had done something similar in 1518 in France; transferring his own infectious energy to an entire village in Strasbourg and keeping the collective lot of them jiving for days on end. Quite a few people had died; Crowley very nearly being one of them. Aziraphale had been forced to restart his heart no less than three times. To which the stupid idiot got up and continued dancing in spite of Aziraphale's progressively hysterical entreaties to _stop, just_ _ **STOP**_ _, YOU STUPID DEMON!_

Crowley had not been able to walk for some weeks afterwards. Even after Aziraphale had healed his feet and spent hours on end massaging the cramps out of his shins, calves and thighs alike. He'd had to piggyback him to the next village over, so that he was able to access the portal what at the time was able to return him to Hell.

And all for want of hearing a particularly 'jiffy' jingle on a Lira da Braccio.

"Nnhgh... yeah, I can do a box step, all right." Crowley conceded after a moments contemplation on the matter. Whether the box step was any more than a traditional Glasgow drunken two-step was up for debate. "Simple fox trot. Probably work that in somewhere." He paused a moment, chewed the corner of his lip. "... where else, you think?"

"In the world, you mean?" After Crowley gave a small nod of affirmation, Aziraphale got to thinking himself. "Well... anywhere. America. Japan. Australia."

Crowley perked up a little. He had lived in Australia a very short stint back in the early 1900's and was summarily called back to England as a result of his own observations detailing that Australian's 'really didn't need any help' from their side. Not from _either_ side, truth be told. The Australian's seemed a quaint, unrivalled exception in which good and bad were equally balanced. In other words, a considerable waste of time in so far as sending earth based agents to otherwise meddle.

Australian's loved their creature comforts; they loved to fight and to swear and to drink and to party and to eat and to toast themselves underneath the metaphorical surface of the sun. They had 'mateship' and 'knife fights' and as much love for their neighbour as hate for their neighbour. Made sense when you considered much of the continent had been occupied by the descendants of England's cast off criminals.

Crowley rather liked the place. He'd enjoyed his handful of years spent there, but was honestly relieved to return to England with his liver intact. His one attempt at instilling some meagre level of malaise amongst the populace was contributing to the recipe base for Vegemite. Turns out that the ineffably whacky Australian's had surprised him yet again by actually taking both proudly and patriotically to the repugnant muck. It had been the rest of the world what suffered when confronted with it. American's in particular, to which Crowley could only report feeling an inexorable sense of pride in a bad job done well.

He had received a commendation for this one, too.

"I could feed a kangaroo." He'd never had an opportunity, his previous visit. There'd been too much tempting to get done. All his own temptations had been forced to go by the wayside. Including visits to the wildlife parks, for which he still maintained a sense of deep and erstwhile regret and resentment. "They've got those little paws."

"They do have those little paws."

"And a pocket. Keep loose change in." Crowley stood up straighter, wearing an expression almost identical to that which Aziraphale donned whence thinking about crepes. "I could hold a _koala_. Try not to catch chlamydia. Swim in the Great barrier Reef. Try not to get manhandled by an octopus. And stung by jellyfish. ...And eaten by Great white sharks." He furrowed a brow, thinking on this in rather the more abject terms. "...Should we _really_ be going to Australia? I think our risk of discorporation is potentially higher. Plus... Australian sun. Hotter than Hell over there." He drew back his lips from his teeth, glancing at Aziraphale's perpetually pale and ever so typically English (though he was not and had never actually been in fact, English) skin. "And you get burned so easily."

"Not all parts of Australia are hot." Said Aziraphale, looking slightly the more abashed by his being in possession of a complexion what rivalled that of Devonshire clotted cream. "And I've heard they have a lot of very good wines down south."

"That Shiraz we like comes from Australia." The Barossa valley Shiraz was a particularly nifty bouquet they often had on stock in the back room of the bookshop. Give Australian's their due, they bloody knew how to drink.

"It does. Plus they produce some very nice Sauvignon Blanc's and cheeses in the southernmost island." Aziraphale was starting to sound as though he might have swallowed a travel agencies catalogue and was currently burping up select portions of it. "The weather's a bit more clement too. Sort of like here, they say."

"Be worth a look. Good wine is definitely worth the risk of getting killed and eaten by most... everything." He gave up on the pumpkin for the moment, turning the entirety of his attention now to Aziraphale. "You're um... sure that you're...?"

Aziraphale gave him a supportive smile, pouring some boiling water into the base of the oven tray from the nearby jug. "Quite sure, yes. I'd have to close up the bookshop a while. You can take some time off from here I'm sure; if you give plenty of notice." He stretched tin-foil over the lamb, ensuring all the sides were tucked in; just as the book had told him. "I know they've come to depend on you awfully, but-"

"They'd be fine if I was dead." Crowley interjected so quickly that he embarrassed himself a little with his enthusiasm. He was happy though, and it seemed a rather okay thing; to permit himself that happiness, give himself over to it. Even if it made him look weak; exposed his belly. "So, we're uh... we're really doing this?"

He wanted it. Oh, so much. To go away. To be with Aziraphale and Aziraphale alone; looking out over the world they had watched grow old beneath the passing of their feet. To take stock of all the myriad changes; the shifting of the mountains, the stretching and rising of the seas, the saplings what had transcended into trees so high they seemed to scrape the very underside of the clouds towards which they eternally reached.

To walk amongst the bustling of the busy cities. Eat at a thousand expensive, snooty and even the more romantic candle sundered restaurants. Hold hands in the streets, lean into one another whilst passing through the busy herds of humans otherwise going about their business. Flutter at the casino's, clear out the buffets, wrap arms about shoulders whilst staring out over ever changing and morphing views. Whether it was buildings, lakes, mountains, oceans, pines, beaches, whatever.

And the nights... when the darkness crept in and encapsulated all corners of whatever rooms they might then find themselves in, then perhaps...

_Perhaps then your hands. Your hands upon and wended about my own. Pressed to the bare lines of my chest. The waylay of one another's curves and otherwise secret, untranslated spaces. Knowing and finding one another deeper still than even the softest spoken words might transgress..._

_Pants caught in ceiling fans, neighbours pounding on the walls, fingers clenched so tightly about elegantly carved bedheads that knuckles near about split the skin from beneath which they peaked..._

_Soft heady moans, fingertips tracing lines what beads of sweat had only just traversed, nails lending themselves to keening red trails along ribcages, hips and buttocks, kisses scented of red wine and champagne..._

_The feeling of you_ inside _of me..._

"You said it best yourself." Aziraphale was saying and Crowley shook himself forcefully out of a fantasy so raunchy he thought it might have put the _Marquis de Sade_ to blushing. "The world owes us a favour. High time we cashed in."

He smiled and was somewhat shocked as to witness the delicate look upon the demon's features; similar to that which he had seen less than an hour earlier in the break room. As though he were about to take to weeping at any given moment and Aziraphale could not imagine, for the eternal life of him, what he had said what might give cause to such dramatic a reaction.

"Are you all right?" He murmured, sliding the lamb into the oven, closing the door and setting the timer. He took the oven mitts off and set them aside, all so as to ensure there was no barrier between his bare hands and Crowley's when he took them up in his grasp and squeezed them. A loving gesture what just made it all the more difficult for Crowley to get his feelings under control.

"Yeah. Um." He put his head down, taking a few deep breaths in through his nose and out through his mouth. It would simply not do to go to pieces so soon after having spectacularly dropping his bundle earlier. He did however make use of the breaths which to sniff for any lingering presences before leaning a little closer and lowering his voice so that the words he next spoke sounded all too appropriately snakey. "I uh... I really want to kissss you right now but I know what you said earlier about... easing up a bit."

Aziraphale, awash with quite as much love as he had ever known, raised Crowley's hands and pressed his lips to each of of his thumbs and then to his fingers. In that moment, he did not feel at all conflicted in what it was that he wanted to do. Desire, it seemed, worked effortlessly in conjunction with love. Giving it a solid leg up where required.

Aziraphale lent his kiss to the ridges of Crowley's knuckles, the backs of his fingers, the vein lines branching across his hands like overzealous spiders webs. He kissed his wrist, felt Crowley's palm canopy his cheek, gliding his thumb so close to his eye that it brushed the lashes. The demon watched, his own eyes bright and anticipatory. Impatient.

Their breaths were heavy when they came together; each uttering a contrarily soft, near identical murmur at the meeting of their lips. To Aziraphale the pain felt more the simple to ignore with each kiss that they shared. He focused instead on the pleasure; the wondrous closeness, the ease of simplicity what came with the sharing of an otherwise primitive act. Crowley once more appeared to be shrinking down into his shoe protectors. His palms had been forming somewhat distracted shapes to each of Aziraphale's shoulder blades.

"You're going to be the discorporation of me." He murmured, clearing his throat and managing to ease himself up and out of Aziraphale's embrace. With a smile, he returned his attentions to the vegetables, just about shearing off half of his fingernails with the knife before getting himself under control. "So, um... maybe we can start planning after my shift? Go to a travel agent or two. Get some ideas, ya know?"

"Sounds like a fine idea." Aziraphale said, amused. He felt still a little flustered himself, but Crowley seemed surprisingly bashful, even by comparison. He reminded himself that the demon had spent a great many years perfecting a, for the most part, unshakeable level of emotional control. Letting his guards down and allowing himself to be vulnerable was obviously difficult.

They glanced over at the sound of someone's knuckles striking the wood frame of the kitchen entryway. Rita was leaning in, her face giving nothing away.

"Could I get you to pop into the office for a moment, Anthony?" She made a prim gesture towards Aziraphale. "Alex, you can come along too."

Crowley waited until Rita had disappeared back across the hall and into the warren of her office before offloading a whistle what most working class persons would recognize as being a foreboder of troubling seas ahead.

"Uh-oh."

"Oh, I knew it." Aziraphale groaned, wiping down the bench top and wrenching the squeegee so hard that he simply expunged all the filth he had just sopped up back from whence it came. "Now I've gone and gotten you in trouble."

Crowley, untying his apron from about his midsection looked distracted. "Relax, she couldn't see anything from the office. Neither could the residents, we're in the kitchen." He hung up the apron and then quickly assisted with untying Aziraphale's, all but taking his head off with the neck strap in his anxious efforts to free it. "No one else is in here. Must be news about Gretchen."

He darted out through the kitchen entryway and Aziraphale, already so far accustomed to this, hurried to catch up. They stepped into Rita's office and she did in fact swish out from behind her desk to close the door behind them.

Rita's office was not, in all fairness of the description, very much of an office. More like a converted broom cupboard that she had attempted to spruce up by hanging pictures of seascapes and beaches from lands quite obviously not of England along the walls. Because nothing said Aruba quite like English suburbia.

She had quite a few photographs standing vigil on her desk. None of which contained cats, Crowley was surprised to find. Actual other human beings. Rita was smiling in some of them. Apparently, it was only his company with which she found to be rather frown inducing.

"I've just received some very sad news." Rita said, crossing back over to press her rather wide bottom to the side of her desk. She pressed her hands together, glanced down a moment and then looked up with such abruptness that Crowley knew, from so many years of interpreting facial expressions, that something _bad_ was coming. "It seems as though Gretchen suffered a complication whilst under observation. The staff at the hospital did their best, but unfortunately, they were not able to bring her back."

In the year 1924, Crowley had been staying a short stint in Canada. He could not quite recall as to what reason. But there had been a lake there; somewhere off nestled between the mountains as though they were the green capped confines of a picturesque tea cup.

The silence in that place had been absolute. He had been able to hear clearly, a small bird glancing their beak across the surface of the water in a bid to pick up an insect. When he had thrown a stone into the water, the sound seemed to resonate through the mountains as though it had been in fact a boulder shattering the crystal clean surface of a mirror. He remembered thinking Aziraphale would have loved it there, and made a vow so as to somehow trick him into hopping across the pond one day for a little sight seeing tour.

The silence what penetrated Crowley's mind following Rita's words was quite as all consuming as this mountain beset lake had been. He might yet have heard the scraping of that tiny birds beak, should it have dipped itself into Rita's long since abandoned water glass.

_Not able to bring her back..._

_Doesn't make any sense. I was talking with her just yesterday. She seemed fine. Old, but fine. She always seemed fine. Not talking funny, not complaining about anything, no more frail than usual. Still fierce and feisty and fighting fit._

_Gone?_

_Just like... that?_

"So, um..." Crowley shook his head, frowned. It seemed very much as though the water from that distant lake was swiftly filling his skull. His thoughts felt dim and numb and... heavy. He was barely aware of Aziraphale's hand finding place of purchase upon his arm. "Gretchen, she's uh... she-she died?"

Rita gave one of those very 'altogether' nods which came more from the chin then it did her neck "I'm afraid so. According to what I was told, it was very quick." She tiled her head at him and this much at least, seemed a genuinely remorseful gesture. "I am sorry. I know that you were fond of her. I've been letting staff know one at a time. Since you were the only one able to properly speak with her, I thought it would only be right to let you know first."

Crowley had ceased listening to the rationale of her reasoning some time back. He was feeling very strange, sort of vague and disconnected from his body. The pressure of Aziraphale's hand was moving up and down on the same patch of his arm and he focused on this, trying to use it as some anchor to bring the wayward ship that was his mind back to port.

He was aware of Aziraphale leading him to sit down in one of the chairs squeezed determinedly into the modest space of Rita's office. Aziraphale sat in the one opposite, taking Crowley's hand between his own and providing a gentle caress as Rita busied herself at the small tea station in the back corner. Crowley had not even been aware of having asked for tea. He supposed it was what the English knew best to do whenever a crisis struck; have a cup of tea and calm the fuck down.

"What about her... belongings?" He asked, suddenly. Rita glanced up from pouring hot water into a cup that might have once possessed a beautiful gold inlay, but had since faded so dramatically it left nothing but the flecked borders.

"Her belongings?"

"She didn't have any family. What happens to her stuff?"

Rita considered this a moment before turning back to tea pouring duties, offering only the slightest, inconsequential twitch of her lower lip. "Donated, where possible."

"Her photos... she had so many photo's..." Crowley murmured, staring back through the keyhole of his memory. He had gone through Gretchen's photographs with her on more than the one occasion. Discussed them at length; spoke of the adventures that she and her husband had had before he had passed. A whole life's worth of memories, just to be... discarded? "Do they just get thrown out? Into a landfill somewhere?"

"Don't worry about any of that right now." There was ever so slight an edge to Rita's tone. She whipped it out of back corner when she perceived a staff member to be giving themselves over to unsightly emotion. Crowley had yet to be a recipient. "Nothing's going anywhere anytime soon."

"She still at the hospital?" Of course, Crowley persisted. It was what he was known for, after all. It was what had seen him right on through to damnation and ever further onward, it seemed.

"Yes."

"What will happen to her?"

"She'll be picked up by the funeral home. They'll arrange for a casket and a burial."

"No funeral?" Crowley heard his voice starting to crack and attempted to clear it. It didn't help much. "She won't even have a _funeral_?"

Rita might not have had Crowley's six thousand years of lived experience but she was incontestably more adept at compartmentalizing her emotions than even this ageless demon. "We'll have a viewing and wake on her behalf, but there really are no funds with which to cover a funeral. She had no savings, no life insurance. She never placed much emphasis on that sort of thing." She handed Crowley a cup of tea; much too milky for his tastes and reeking suspiciously of English breakfast. His least favourite tea bag. "Here."

"I could..." Crowley's mind continued racing. Better then letting it slow down. Letting it feel. It had been... like with Aziraphale... better to do something. _Drown it_. "I mean, I uh... I have some money... could I pay? For the funeral, I mean."

Rita and Aziraphale looked at him with near matching expressions of pure, undiluted astonishment. For rather the different reasons but the shock registered the same on the emotional Richter scale.

"That would not be at all appropriate." Rita said after a moment, leaning back on the corner of her desk and folding her hands just over the rise of her crooked thigh. Her voice was not harsh, but eminently practical. "And besides, the costs would be exorbitant."

"I don't give a hootenanny about appropriate." Crowley said. Aziraphale was more often the stubborn one out of the two of them but it seemed Crowley could be just as pig headed when he wanted to be. "And I have an exorbitant amount of money. _Please_."

Two months he had taken care of Gretchen.

Two _months_.

Two months in which she had been better understood than the however many years she'd been shelved away in this stuffy old nursing home; subjected to a simple one or two word greeting and meeting of base needs.

Where did duty of care start and end?  
Did it end there at the hospital? When she died _alone_?

_'I've got nothing else. Might as well fuss over you.'_

Crowley felt a pain in his chest. The feeling that he had failed. _Failed, failed, FAILED._

The bookshop on fire. Aziraphale gone.

All that he loved just... _gone_.

It could all be... gone. Just like trying to grip onto a handful of sand. It slipped free, leaving only granules behind. Memories. Nothing tangible.

_Gone._

"I would be happy," He heard a voice say and realized that it was Aziraphale. Aziraphale forming words in a silence into which Crowley had been permitting himself to drown whilst otherwise staring in bung eyed absolution into his cup of too weak tea. "-to facilitate the cost and workings of the funeral. As a private citizen. That should absolve... Anthony of any boundary related issues."

"We couldn't ask that." Rita was saying and then Aziraphale replied that he was offering, that he and _Crowley (we)_ were offering. That Gretchen deserved the dignity of a decent funeral. And Crowley was staring at him, grateful, touched and more in love with his kindness and his warmth and his goodness by the moment and wanting to just hold him; disappear into him, curl up and let those arms enclose him on all sides.

Rita gave Aziraphale a card. It was the contact information of the funeral service the Grange Estate used. Rita suggested that if Aziraphale wished to do something out of his own pocket that he get in touch with them to make arrangements.

Aziraphale might have put the card into his wallet but doing so would have meant taking a hand away from Crowley to retrieve it. He contented himself with simply holding onto it for the time being. It was a small thing. But a small thing which meant _everything_ so far as Crowley was concerned. Further evidence still of the angel's enduring generosity and thoughtfulness.

"Now, on a more personal level," Rita eased herself forward so that she was closer to Crowley. Her tone was far the more temperate and genuine then he'd ever heard it and it made him feel as though he'd been a little unfair to keyhole her as being a particularly taciturn nurse ratchet type upon first impressions. "I want to make sure that you're all right, pet." She squeezed his shoulder and Crowley could tell that it was not her first time trotting out this particular talk. And not for want of it seeming practiced, but rather because she handled it such as she handled all tasks of which she undertook; authentically and professionally. "Death is an unfortunate occupational hazard in this industry. But it certainly doesn't make it any easier knowing it. What may help however is to know that Gretchen lived herself a long and happy life. She made the most of every opportunity. And I can see that you gave her some real joy in her final few months on earth. I'm sure she was grateful for your care and support."

"Support... yeah..." Crowley mused, watching the not yet dissolved white strains of milk drifting obsoletely across the surface of his tea. He became aware of another card being passed over to Aziraphale; his being the patently more 'pulled together' of the pair.

"Our staff do have six free sessions with the _Macintyre's_ counselling service. Anthony," He jerked his chin briefly at the sound of his ascribed name. "If you do feel as though you're not coping with things, just give them a call and you can see someone free of charge. Your partner can go along, if that helps."

He nodded, taking a sip of tea. It was much too weak. But what did that matter?

He'd enjoyed his little smoke breaks with Gretchen.

She'd been a good confidante. Kept shit real. Understood him in a way that not many, save Aziraphale, could. And Gretchen had only had the two months with which to acclimatize herself to Crowley's particular brand of strangeness.

_Gone._

_Like a stone sinking beneath the crystal clear surface of a silent lake._

_Like ...burning parchment._

"Thanks." He murmured, his tone just desolate sounding enough to rouse a wrist rub from Rita. She looked genuinely upset herself and Crowley remembered that she, of course, had known Gretchen far longer than he had. Rita too was mourning but doing her utmost to put the feelings of her staff first. His respect for her shot up more the higher for this. It certainly put the entirety of Hell's bureaucracy to shame by comparison.

"Why don't you head home for the day, mate? Give yourself some time?"

"Oh... no, no. It'll be okay." Crowley said, dismissively. Going home would be a bad idea. Especially now that Aziraphale was stuck here for the next how many hours labouring over a piece of meat he'd likely just as much burn as... well, burn. "You're understaffed today."

"We can always manage."

"You got lunch time meds. And the meals. Everyone else..."

"Tell you what," Rita it seemed was steadfast in her conviction to send Crowley packing and just as stubborn as he himself could be when she got it in her mind to do something. "How's about you just finish whatever duties you've been assigned and head off when your partner finishes at two?" She nodded her head towards Aziraphale, as though there was some question as to who said 'partner' was. "But if you feel as though you aren't coping, just let one of the staff know and head out early. Can you promise me that?"

"Yeah." Crowley took another sip of over milky tea. He knew full well that he wasn't about to go and head out early; not with Aziraphale still holding fort in the kitchen. It just seemed easier to agree with Rita now, rather than argue the rub.

"I'll keep an eye on him." Said the angel, a firm palm glancing up over the curve of Crowley's spine and then cupping to the back of his neck. He caressed him tenderly and Crowley once more fought the inappropriately undemonic urge to just collapse into him like a toppled tree. Well, not only was it undemonic but it was also unprofessional.

"Thank you. I'll let you sit for a moment. I need to let the rest of the staff know."

Rita stepped on past and out through the office door, closing it behind her. Crowley took another sip of tea. Wasn't at all sure why he bothered. It was something to do, he supposed.

"Oh, my dear," Aziraphale murmured, his thumb rubbing circles into the soft ridge below Crowley's hairline. "I... I don't really know what to say."

"You don't need to say anything." Crowley put the tea up on the desk and reached out with his now free hand. He took up the one Aziraphale had set to his lap, wound their fingers together. "... sit with me a bit, yeah?"

_Gone._

_You're... gone._

"Of course." Aziraphale was saying, his arm dropped down to cosset Crowley's shoulders and pull him over to lean against him. Crowley let himself go, for it was easier than the pretence of _not_ wanting to do so and set his cheek to Aziraphale's shoulder. He squeezed his hand tighter and took a deep breath in from his neck. He could smell his cologne and deeper still, that natural clean, new and wholesome scent what was ever so intrinsically Aziraphale. His hand was warm and he felt too the slight shifting of his fingers; the bones, the rising and flexing of the knuckles. The breaths in and out, of lungs that did not require oxygen but were put to practice all the same.

He was here. He was _still_ here.

Not gone.

Not _gone_.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks for reading, everyone! If you ever have any thoughts on the piece, or any questions, I encourage you to ask away. In the meantime, feel free to pop over into the next update and to continue reading!
> 
> All my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	26. Of ashes, and four letter words.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He stretched his hand up, once as he might have done when reaching for an unheeding Heaven and slipped his fingers about the back of Aziraphale's neck; pulling him down to where their lips could once again meet. The kiss was deep, as deep as the darkness into which he had once fallen, but warmer than the world's first sun and lingering in a way what made the insurmountable and absolute nothingness of damnation dim by comparison.  
> And in the swamp of his alcohol suffused mind, Crowley felt the irresistible pull of a more base and primitive desire and broke from the kiss so as to lend his lips to the shell of Aziraphale's ear.
> 
> "Lay with me, angel..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Bit of a longer update this time, guys. We're getting there, bit by bit :)  
> On a random note; I used to like anime when I was in my late teens, early twenties. Now, I found it very annoying and headache inducing. My husband watches it. He's watching it right now, in fact. And it seems to consist of precious little besides people screaming for way too long and way too hard and really over the top, over-dramatically written lines. Bloody hell -_-
> 
> Of course, absolutely and to each their all to anyone who watches and enjoys anime. No judgment. The only judgment comes from my husband watching said anime at a volume what I swear is catered at a cadence intended to splinter apart otherwise perfectly useful eardrums into a thousand non-functioning pieces. That is my predominant gripe, so absolutely no offense intended to those who enjoy anime. I'm sure you watch and listen to it, at a perfectly acceptable volume :) 
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Some suggestive themes, a bit of the touchy-touchy, but nothing so much as to really write home about.
> 
> Thanks as always for your support everyone! Hope you enjoy the update!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**Heaven - Main Parlour...** _

"Is it odd you suppose, that a part of me is looking forward to going back?"

Sandalphon glanced over from his purposeless vigil. Even when in constant flux of the earths most prominent skylines, the windows of Heaven seemed somehow just a little more dull than usual.

A bland interpretation, he thought, of an otherwise more wholesome reality.

"Earth, you mean?" The question was just as pointless as the view. He knew what Uriel meant. They had all been feeling it.

That strange pull. An indeterminable want, unfamiliar so far as angels were concerned.

The archangel chuckled softly. This in and of itself, spoke worlds. Uriel had not always been so serious. She had known laughter at one point in her eons of existence.

It had been a long time gone.

"Say what you will, but they certainly keep things interesting." And off of Sandalphon's look, elaborated. "The demons, I mean."

The Seraphim sniffed, turning his gaze outward once more. The skyline shifted to that of night time Tokyo. The lights flashed and twinkled at an unattainable, hallow distance.

He'd never been one to place much stock in excitement. It detracted from keeping ones head screwed on straight.

And yet he could appreciate where Uriel was coming from.

Something had changed. A seed had drifted in upon the wind and taken root in a barren, inhospitable landscape. Finding nourishment in what might have been a small crack what had formed beneath concrete, long since considered to be set in place.

Sandalphon sniffed again.

It smelt clean, Heaven.

No. Not clean.

It smelt of... nothing.

Absolutely _nothing._

* * *

**~X~**

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**London's Soho... ** _

Crowley had no appetite for the sandwich. Aziraphale brought it home with him, thinking he might have better luck with enticing the demon to eat later. When he was a little less upset.

He worried about Crowley driving, though. He'd all but slept walk through the remainder of his shift, seeming to be, so far as Aziraphale could tell, a million miles away.

Gretchen's death had shaken him, that much was obvious. But in six thousand years, Crowley and Aziraphale both had been touched by death more times than the two of them could count. It was hardly the first time of which the demon had heard the mortal bell toll.

The difference was, Aziraphale supposed, that in all those six thousand years, Crowley had made only mutually beneficial human acquaintances. He had never made a friend of one of them. He himself had so often said it made quite as much sense as sinking your heart and soul into a jug of milk. Any number of things could happen to said milk, but the one irreconcilable fact was that it would, if let alone, expire upon the shelf.

Humans were no different. They too had a shelf life. They were perishable. They perished with remarkable tenacity, in fact.

But Crowley had felt particularly responsible for the care of this specific jug of milk. He had, against his better sense, become attached to it.

On the car ride home, Aziraphale knew fell well that he was staring but he cared little to amend what might be considered a social impertinence. Crowley's jaw was set quite as granite hard as it so often was; his back teeth obviously soldered together so that even the most determined atom would have a hard time permeating the gaps. His eyes were shelved behind his glasses as usual but Aziraphale hardly needed to stare into them to have an idea of what the demon was feeling inside. They had known one another so long, that a simple glimpse of the lines of his face, the angle of his chin, even the flex of his fingers spoke intimately of Crowley's inner workings.

He spoke not but a word. Not until they had reached the bookshop and he had parked out front; the disabled parking bay sluicing neatly out of existence to make room for the Bentley's girth. Crowley knocked the handbrake on, left the ignition running and one hand firmly beset the wheel.

"Right. ... Your stop." He said solemnly, turning to cast an offhand glance out the window. Aziraphale fought the rising urge to reach over and smack him across the leg with the warped base of the Tupperware container.

"You do realize that you're coming inside, yes? Tonight is not a night you ought to be alone. All things considered." He climbed up out of the passenger seat, crossing around to the street side of the car and opening Crowley's door. He snapped his fingers and the key turned in the ignition, the engine puttering out. "Come." He held his hand out, tone of voice a firm indication that he was not about to tolerate any of Crowley's usual cheek.

The demon, however, had precious little energy left in his reserves; far too little to bandy the likes of any such cheek. He had been wanting to come inside but had more the point wanted to be invited. He took the keys out of the ignition, groaning as he slid the fingers of his right hand into Aziraphale's waiting palm and all but forcing the angel to drag his limp body out of the drivers seat.

Aziraphale, taking it upon himself to lock the car doors with another simple snap of the fingers, passed his arm then across Crowley's waist and placed his other hand to the back of the demon's wrist; fighting for place of purchase alongside his garishly large watch. Crowley fairly much allowed himself to be led, a dreary look on his face which might very well be described as the visual equivalent of Lovecraftian drizzle.

"Here." Aziraphale said, taking Crowley's jacket once they were inside the shop and hanging it upon the coat rack. They had changed out of their 'work' uniforms before departing the Grange Estate and Aziraphale had been carrying them, along with the sandwich, on his lap the entire ride back. He reminded himself to put them through the wash later (though he hardly fancied he would have need of his ever again) but felt it was rather the more pressing to attend to Crowley. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll get you a drink."

"Right." Crowley carved his usual path towards the settee and paused as though misremembering the route along the way. He glanced over at Aziraphale, who was in the midst of storing the uneaten sandwich in the fridge, and asked, feeling strangely defiant: "You know what? You got any bottles of bubbles 'bout the place?"

Aziraphale loitered in the entryway of the kitchenette, eyes sliding into the corners of his sockets and donning that subtle hitch of a smile what Crowley recognized as him holding court with bashfulness.

"Well... you might think me terribly presumptuous but... I do in fact have that bottle of _Moet and Chandon 1914_ chilling in the refrigerator. Just in case... all went as according to plan today." He gave a soft, humourless sort of chuckle. "Which it... _somewhat_ did."

Crowley, placing his glasses on the table beside the settee, looked to Aziraphale with now obvious wide eyed astonishment. "The 1914? Wasn't that the bottle what you were keeping around for a special occasion?"

Aziraphale just gave him a look what was somehow as pointed as it was doting and the demon felt a flush warm his neck. Oh. Of course.

Wasn't used to this, still. All of this 'things going his own way for a change', stuff.

"What were you planning on doing if it _hadn't_ gone to plan?" He asked, flumping down heavily onto the settee and swinging his legs up over the arm. He wasn't worried about getting too comfortable now. That ship had sailed.

"Oh, I would have drunk it still. Only I... would have drunk it alone. With perhaps the temporary company of twenty pounds of devil's food cake. Culinary irony, and all that." Aziraphale hesitated a half-hearted stones throw from the refrigerator. "Do you suppose it... appropriate?" He asked, thoughtfully, eyes as warm and as gentle as a Jersey cows. If, of course, a Jersey cow had eyes in which both blue and green gave persistent 'what-for' in their right to wholesomely represent. "Given what happened with your Gretchen...?"

Crowley felt yet another wave of blistering sharp defiance course through him. "Aziraphale... what happened between us today is the best and most important thing I have ever felt like celebrating. Now, I don't wanna come off sounding like an arsehole, but I'll be blessed if I go and let anything or _anyone_ , ruin that." He threw his hands up over the back of the settee's arm, staring at the wooden beams of the aged shops ceiling. A small lick of guilt wormed its way in through all the self-righteous anger. Enough to make him second guess himself. "Besides, Gretchen... is probably watching us right now, thinking ' _You little shit, fancy being a demon all that time_ ' and wishing us all the best while stabbing out a dart on Gabriel's favourite armchair. She didn't waste much time with bemoaning the sad stuff, did old Gretch. She wouldn't want us sitting here, face in our palms all night long. No."

He turned his head, smiling with contentment at Aziraphale, who had taken the opportunity to hang up his own coat and slip into his favourite grey cardigan. Affection swilled through Crowley as though he were a snifter of fine brandy, cupped by the hand of an otherwise hapless consumer. _The world,_ he thought, _was back to being right once more_.

"You kissed me today, angel. I kissed you _right on back_." They both flushed and tittered a little. Aziraphale did however look rather the more proud of himself and simply trying to taper down the feeling such as very modest people are so prone to doing. "Life moves on. And I bloody well believe that's worth drinking to."

"Well... I rather do agree." Aziraphale said, flipping back the collar of his cardigan so that it lay flush. He was still a little pink round the edges and was having a heck of a time keeping the smile off of his face. "Very well. We shall pop that cork and share a toast. To us. And to dear Gretchen as well."

"Might want to put a few more on ice, if you got 'em." Crowley suggested, as Aziraphale trotted momentarily out of sight. "I've been going out way too much lately." He groaned softly, rubbing fingertips to sore, aching eyes. "Be honest... I _hate_ going out. Without _you_ , anyway. Maybe I'm getting too old, I don't know..."

"Why _have_ you been, then?" Aziraphale emerged with a matching pair of champagne flutes dangling from between his fingers like crystalline bats and the bottle of vintage bubble clutched about the neck in his free hand. Crowley sat up and reached for it, happily prepared to do the uncorking.

"Easier than staying home. Head swirling with thoughts about you. Being out was a distraction. Not a great one. Not one that stuck. The thinking still came." He pierced the foil, unwinding it from the neck and exposing the cork. He started to wiggle it about. "Honestly, angel. All I'm wanting to do right now is to sit back, get shit faced and be with you. Just talk some absolute horse dung, you know. Like always."

An idea having formed itself in his mind, he got up off of the settee and headed towards the laundry room with the bottle. He gestured with his head for Aziraphale to follow.

"Come on, angel. Let's ring this in good and proper. Send this cork Heaven high."

"It'll probably come down on the neighbours roof." Aziraphale muttered, but that was ever as much protest as he cared to trot out. He followed Crowley out through the laundry room and found the demon, in the middle of the courtyard, struggling still to free the cork from the bottle. He tried and failed to smother the snorting laugh what burst from him at the sight. "Would you like me to-?"

"Nah, nah, nah. I got it." He gestured again for Aziraphale to come closer. The courtyard was lit by a warm afternoon light, sun still high enough and strong enough to hold some heat to it. Shadows lingered mere breaths away, suggestive of things unseen, unknown and ever the more seductive.

"Right. Here we go!" Crowley eased his thumbs in underneath the cork and with one final push, pistoned it off into the sky above with just the right amount of 'pop' that he had been hoping for. They didn't wait to hear where it had landed; Crowley pouring the most generous helping one was capable of dispensing into a skinny champagne flute before the expensive bubbly discharged itself onto the paving stones.

"Well then... to that henceforth incoming horse dung and the angry phone call from a neighbour I am undoubtedly about to receive." Aziraphale said, holding up his champagne flute. Crowley, beaming, sidled in around it so as to place a kiss to the angel's mouth. Aziraphale felt so intrinsically aware of every tiny thing in that moment; the pressure, the warmth, the...

The _love._

He had never before been able to _sense_ Crowley's love. A demon had natural divergent barriers about their body, what prohibited an angel being able to perceive any of their emotions. Especially those ones what might have been a little more to the side of soft. Demonstrably considered to be a sign of weakness in their own corrupted minds.

But he felt it then.

Not a flash, but a pressure what was almost as tangible as that which was espoused by Crowley's lips. A push outward, so profound it made Aziraphale's heart swell. Warmed the cockles of his chest, filled his mind with such reciprocal feelings of adoration that it wrought tears to his eyes.

_His love. I can... feel it._

_And it's... warm. Warm and good and..._

_Selfless._

"To us." Crowley was saying, his lips having parted from Aziraphale's some moments earlier. He tapped their champagne flutes together, prompting the crystal to sing its doleful canticle and smiled. The angel, awash still with what he had felt, returned the smile, blissfully.

"And to Gretchen." He added, to which Crowley surprised him by pinching his thumb and index finger and shaking them emphatically from side to side.

"No. _No_. Selfish old coot went and turned up her toes on what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life. She can blessed well wait until the secondary toast for her look in. No, _this one_ is about you and me." He took a belt of champagne, waiting then for a somewhat amused Aziraphale to do the same before clearing his throat and making a proper go of elevating the flute once more. "Right. And now... to Gretchen."

"To Gretchen." Aziraphale said and so they tinged glasses once more and drank further still of the delicious and treasured bouquet.

* * *

These were toasts what then preceded a long afternoon, and longer night still, in deep, raucous and muchly missed conversation with one another. So deeply engaged were they with the making up for two months misspent, that they decided not to go out to dinner but to order in, instead.

It was late by that moment, and the food did not sop up nearly enough of what had progressed onto the slaying of four bottles of champagne (each progressively the cheaper by the cork). Crowley was currently stalking the borders of the study area with number five clasped in inappropriately loose fingers, swigging when he saw fit to take a break from wobbling from side to side as though he were surfing an imaginary wave. They were revisiting some story from back in the old days and laughing so hard at said story that they had both been forced to mop their eyes at some juncture or another.

"- of _course_ I remember, you nearly _drowned_ me, you stupid bastard!" Aziraphale tried to get a much needed breath in edgeways, dabbing tears from his cheeks with his handkerchief. Crowley, all but draped about one of the shops period support beams, snorted three hundred pound champagne out of both nostrils.

"Now I _know_ you're three sheets to the wind!" He laughed, snatching Aziraphale's handkerchief out of the air as the angel tossed it his way. He used it to clean up his face and blow what was now a very uncomfortably tingly nose. "I love it when you start to swear! Racking up those points for down below... _Whooo..._ "

"No one's counting anymore. I can swear to my hearts content. But back to what we were discussing," Aziraphale waggled his glass encouragingly and Crowley all but lurched across the room in a drunken bid to fill it. "I hardly see where you get off being belligerent on the matter. How the Hell was I supposed to know that you were on board the damned ship? It wasn't as though you bothered with updating me on your plans to travel to America!"

"Well, I just... well, you might have _informed_ me that Heaven had made you aware of the apparently 'unsinkable' ship being sunk right on out there in the Atlantic. Just your considerate 'Hey, heads up demon _compadre_ of mine, but a ship what is leaving from the continent upon which we have both established permanent residences is due to Glasgow kiss an iceberg and sink spectacularly and in fine form to the bottom of the ocean. Might wanna pack your floaties'." Crowley held up his hands. "Just saying." He noticed the champagne bottle in one of said hands and paused to take another gulp from it in a manner what lacked nothing of the commitment one might otherwise impress upon a Jaeger bomb.

Aziraphale chuckled fondly at the memory. Well... not that it was a fond memory, but when the focus was predominantly on Crowley, _that_ was when the humour was able to be otherwise appreciated. "You should just be grateful that I was working undercover as a White Star Line officer at the time. I didn't see anyone else jumping out of one of the life rafts to come to your rescue in the freezing cold water. To pry your ice encrusted little fingers off of the deck chair you were all but wrapped around."

"Oh, don't remind me, angel. It was so bloody cold. Worse than Hell even." Crowley shuddered at the memory. Over a hundred years later, and he swore black and blue that he could _still_ feel the cold what had in fact rendered his toes black and blue. "And you were so round and warm. Like a big barrel of brandy. I could have sucked the blood out of you like a parasitic tic."

"It was quite enough that you nearly foundered me. You really must learn to swim one of these days. More than a doggy paddle, at least." Aziraphale made a mocking demonstration of paddling his hands through the air; wild-eyed and panicky, much as how Crowley looked whenever dropped into deep enough water. "It's little wonder you haven't yet drowned."

"This coming from the angel who refuses to learn how to drive a car."

"Swimming is a _necessity_. More than..." Aziraphale struggled to come up with the accurate statistic what applied to this example and failed to pluck it from the swamp of his mind. He went with his best guess, instead. "- eighty-two percent of this planet is comprised of water."

"Uh-huh." Said Crowley, tongue set to the corner of his mouth in that way he had what said he was unimpressed. And trying to work out if the maths Aziraphale had levelled at him was correct or not. "And there are now, on average, around... four point eight million roads all wrapped around the earth like silly string." He was most probably lying about this statistic. But hey, he was a demon. It was to be expected. "What if I die one day, angel. Huh? You gonna go on just catching public transportation well into eternity?"

"Don't be silly. I simply won't have you die before me." Aziraphale said, with a teasing smile. He sipped carefully from the top of his near overflowing glass, tipping it just that little too far and sending a drop skittering down the side. "That would be far too inconvenient."

"Oh, so _you're_ going to die first, is that it? Thanks a lot, fucking lovely experience _that_ was the first time I thought it happened. Now I gotta go through it again?" Crowley flicked two fingers up in the air at the angel. "Get stuffed. I'm gonna drink every last drop left in this bottle, just to teach you a lesson."

"Dear, I meant no offense and could you please use a glass? It's unseemly."

Crowley brought the bottle up to his lips and took another overzealous slurp of the contents. "Why? You worried you're uh..." He swished his way over, ankles near tangling about themselves as he came and swung a leg to each side of the angel's broad waist, settling his arms over his shoulders. The contents of the half full bottle sloshed somewhere from behind Aziraphale's left ear as Crowley dropped himself firmly into his lip, grinning into his face from a bare inch or so away. "-gonna catch _germs_ off of me?"

"Oh, hardly." The angel gave an ironic titter, setting his glass down upon the study desk and placing his palms to the arch of Crowley's slender hips. It was an impulse, one which seemed appropriate for that moment. It might not have come so easily had he not had quite so much to drink. "I think the ship has well and truly sailed into the side of _that_ particular iceberg."

Dutch courage can be a marvellous thing and ever the more useful where smothering those otherwise vexatious squeals of the celestial armaments. As Crowley eased in, brushing their lips together, Aziraphale experienced only the slightest glance of referred spiritual sting. As though a brazen detractor were shouting from a very great distance. It was easily ignored. What _wasn't_ so easy to ignore, was the resounding chorus of his own desires; made stronger and more persistent by the disinhibiting potency of the alcohol. He sought the kiss; without any of the shame, hesitance or questioning he might usually entertain.

"Are you in pain?" Crowley softly asked, where, after some time, there was permitted a space between their lips.

"No, my dear." Aziraphale glazed his palms along the lines of Crowley's back, fingers tracing the curves of his shoulder blades. It brought to mind the perfect arch of the demon's exquisite cheekbones and Aziraphale felt such a strong rush of desire go through him that it stole the breath from his lungs. "But... perhaps we ought to stop."

Crowley growled, tilting his head back. "Ohhh... _whhyyy_?"

"Because, I... we..." Aziraphale's eyes took in the smooth, exposed column of the demon's neck. The next thing he knew, his lips were set against it; kisses supping the ridge of his throat, the hallow above the collarbone , the lithe indent running down from behind his ear. "... don't want to go... too..."

"Are you really about to say 'too fast?'" Crowley said, sitting back with a very unimpressed look on his face. He tried to focus on Aziraphale's expression, but his brain was veritably capsizing in a churning sea of alcohol, which lent a filter of blurriness to the edges of his vision. "It feels _good_ , angel. What are you afraid of?"

"You know perfectly well what I'm afraid of." Aziraphale said, wine flushed cheeks reddening further still as an image leapt into his mind with such clarity it might very well have been a mental photograph. An image of he and Crowley, tripping up all over themselves, sprawling ungainly into the bedroom, all arms and legs and ripped seams and scattered inhibitions and precious moments lost amidst the memory fogging potency of too much alcohol. "Look, I'm... I'm going to sober up."

"Fine. You sober up." Crowley said, leaning back and gulping back another belligerent mouthful of champagne between petulantly pouting lips. It was clear that he himself had no desire to return to status quo and Aziraphale decided it was not the time to push him into doing so.

He visibly winced as the alcohol left his system. He didn't dispense with it entirely; keeping just enough on board to take the edge off of the celestial burs. He glanced up at Crowley, face turned away and bottom lip put out in sympathy of his mood.

"Don't go getting in a huff." The angel teased, reaching up and placing his hand on the side of Crowley's cheek that was turned away from him. He eased his face back around, the demon doing his utmost not to relent in his haughty performance and smile. "All I ask is that we slow things down a little. It would hardly do to try and fit six thousand years worth of missed opportunity into one drunken evening. There are... certain things we should be... present for. I for one would prefer for alcohol to _not_ take any of that away."

He gave Crowley another kiss, more as a means to reassure him. It still felt ever so lovely, Aziraphale thought, permitting just the slightest touch of their tongues.

"I dare say that we are getting rather good at this." He remarked, as they separated, each a little more flustered than moments earlier.

"Can see why the humans put so much stock in it." Crowley took another belt of champagne and winced, fidgeting a little. "Bit awkward on the old knees here..." They were barely wedged in-between the sides of Aziraphale's thighs and the inflexible arms of his study chair.

"Well, no one said you were obligated to continue sitting there."

Crowley set one hand on Aziraphale's shoulder, balancing what little there was of his weight down into the angel just long enough to swing both legs about so that they now wrapped about the back of the chair. "How's that?" He asked, to which the angel responded by bursting into laughter.

" _Ridiculous_! That can't be comfortable."

Crowley gave a somewhat preening smile as he leaned back, spine arching over Aziraphale's knees so that his upper body now rested perpendicular to the floor. Aziraphale took the champagne bottle out of his hand before it met a devastating fate, quietly in awe of just how ridiculously flexible the demon was. Well, surprises none, really. He _had_ entered the world as a snake, after all.

"You forget that I'm spineless, angel." Crowley remarked, which was sort of rather ironic really; as snakes are essentially nothing _but_ spine. "And legless. I could fit through the gap beneath a door and the awkward pauses between sentences." He weaved an arm about in the air, like a cobra alighting from the depths of a wicker basket at the summons of its masters flute. "Like the sands of time, I am."

"Yes, so you are." Aziraphale, in spite of having only just sobered up, took another parting sip from the bottle before slapping his hand down on Crowley's oblate stomach. _Good Lord, you could iron a shirt on that thing._ "And the sands of time suggest we really ought be taking ourselves off to bed. It's getting late. Or _early_ , rather."

Crowley groaning, swinging himself up vertical and wishing he hadn't done it quite so quickly. Not only did it constitute a sort of a sit up (exercise being one of those things which he would hardly consider to be his scene) but it made his head spin both unhelpfully and suspiciously.

"Yeah, yeah. All right." He grumbled, spinning a fingertip about on the surface of each temple and redirecting the pathway of his intoxicated brain so that the aching ceased. "I'll sober up and make tracks."

"No, uh... no that wasn't what I was suggesting." Aziraphale placed the champagne bottle down and put his hands once more to either side of Crowley's waist. It was a temperate touch this time, rather than one possessed of passion. "What I meant was... well, given everything... I don't think it a very good idea for you to be alone tonight. What I mean to say is... that you are welcome to stay here."

Crowley stared back at the angel, somewhat suspiciously, before his eyes then roved over to alight upon the settee.

"On the... on the couch, you mean?"

"No. No, I meant... in the bed." Aziraphale was getting better with maintaining eye contact, but he wasn't quite all the way there yet. Especially when it came to being embarrassed. "With... me."

"Right." Said Crowley, taking some small mercy in not pulling Aziraphale up on his unneeded addition of the 'with me' whence aligned to his own aforementioned bed. After all, who else did he expect that Crowley would be sharing the bed with? Noel Coward?

Aziraphale took Crowley's silence as a sign that he had said something wrong and started to back peddle so drastically it was a surprise he did not send his chair to tipping over. "If you're not comfortable-"

"Oh, _I'd_ be comfortable, angel." Crowley interjected, seeing Aziraphale on the cusp of upending him spectacularly onto the floor and shooting off to lock his increasingly panicky self in the bathroom for the night. "Slept on walls and been more'n comfortable enough. Just so as wondering whether _you'd_ be comfortable?" He rolled a shoulder, dipping his head towards the bedroom with a knowing quirk of his brow. "Fairly small bed. The two of us. In the one. Small. Bed. The uh... you know. Change of relationship dynamic." He puckered his lips unnecessarily. Aziraphale reached up and pinched his fingers to each side of them, staring up at him from beneath pointed brows.

"I _was_ planning on _sleeping_ , Crowley. I assure you I have managed to control myself over the passing of the years, I'm hardly about to succumb to such urges now."

Crowley snatched Aziraphale's hand away; all the better to gleefully gawp at the angel. "Oh, so you _have_ been controlling it then? The _Urges_ you apparently never get?"

Aziraphale poked him in the stomach with the mouth of the bottle. "The offer stands. Feel as free to go and sleep in your car if that would suit you better." He made an attempt to stand up, which Crowley did absolutely nothing in the way of assisting with. "Would you kindly untangle yourself from about my person?"

Sighing quite as dramatically as he possibly could, Crowley unhooked his ankles from about the back of the chair and eased himself onto his feet. He gave a little wobble before righting himself and then assisted with tugging Aziraphale up by his hand.

"Oh, all right. If you absolutely _insist_ on my charming company for the remainder of the night." He put an arm about the angel's shoulders, taking the bottle out of his hand and placing a kiss to his cheek. "I'll see you in the... _bedroom_."

With that purposefully provocative insinuation, Crowley swished his way over to the bedroom door, making an extra show of dancing in what he likely perceived to be a sexy manner, before slinking about the doorway and all but careening off of the chest of drawers he hadn't taken stock of in the dark. Aziraphale nonetheless had a laugh to himself. Crowley was awkward and dramatic and ridiculous and the angel had missed it all so terribly.

Whilst the demon got about doing whatever constituted preparing himself for bed, Aziraphale made his way about the shop, switching off lamps, checking door and window locks and ensuring most everything was in order. Passing back by his study desk, he remembered his mobile phone and unplugged it from the charge. The screen lit up, showing that he had missed a call from Crowley and that he had a voice mail message.

_That's right. Crowley asked me earlier if I had checked my messages. This must be what he meant._

The call had come in just about the same time as Aziraphale had arrived at the Grange Estate nursing home. He opened up his Voice mail and pressed on the indicated button to play the message.

_"Yeah, um... hi."_ Speaking of awkward. _"Hope everything's ok. You know... after all that with... that lot, yesterday."_ There was a pause and what sounded like Crowley taking a very slow, measured breath. He must have been nervous, Aziraphale surmised. _"Look, I uh... I just wanted to say, I'm sorry about... freezing you out these past couple of months. I haven't dealt with any of this at all well, and... I'm ready to uh, to talk."_

Aziraphale felt his eyebrows slide on up into the lines of his equally astonished brow. _Ready to talk?! Well that was rather far from the impression you jolly well gave me when I fronted up at the nursing home! Cheeky so-and-so, playing me like that!_

_"If you are. I mean, I can understand if you don't want to but uh... if you do, well..."_ Crowley's voice was growing more the anxious by the moment and he was not conducting himself with quite the level of decorum to which the angel was accustomed. This did flatter Aziraphale, a little. _"I might pop by the bookshop after my shift, if that's okay. I mean, let me know if it's not. Just give me a call. Send me a message. If I don't hear from you, I'll assume that means it's okay to swing by. I'll bring dinner if you like, whatever."_

Aziraphale glanced towards the bedroom as the light from the ensuite flashed on. Crowley came slumping out wearing a set of black silk pyjama's he must have miracled onto himself, arms stretched above his head as he gave a wide, lion like yawn. The pyjama top rode up just enough to offer a glimpse of a band of flesh, just above the trouser elastic. It was dappled by dark hair and wasn't quite so tan as Crowley's neck, hands and face.

Aziraphale thought it extraordinarily sensual. It might not have been anything quite so risqué as the glance of an inside thigh (or, by Aziraphale's estimates, a bare ankle bone) but it was clearly a part of Crowley that he perhaps did not pay quite as much attention to as those parts of him the world was intended to see. Those parts of which he was meticulous in attending to.

That slight glimpse of stomach was a hidden part of him; a part only Aziraphale was permitted to see. It struck the angel so deeply, that he quite nearly missed the end of the message, which did in fact render him ever the more dumbstruck.

_"I've got to get back to work, but hopefully I'll see you tonight. Be well. ...love you."_

The phone slipped out of Aziraphale's hand. Fortunately, the aged carpet was soft enough to cushion a fall what might have otherwise fractured the screen into a thousand pieces. Not that Aziraphale was paying any of this the slightest mind.

_Love you._

Crowley had said it. _Actually said it._

Over a phone message mind, but it was still incontrovertibly a courageous act. He had put it out there, left the lure of his vulnerability hanging, with no guarantee as to how Aziraphale might have responded to it. Considering that the angel had historically responded ever the more poorly to his suggestion of their being 'partners' and his reluctance to incorporate any inclusive terms which might suggest they were anything more than just an angel and a demon.

Crowley, who was awkward and ridiculous and often times curt and sharp and who possessed a tongue what could cut like glass and eyes that could about sear the edges from your soul with the intensity of his gaze. Crowley who would cower from the clenching of a fist but who was braver than most anyone he knew when it came to matters of the heart.

It was the emotional equivalent of hurling yourself into an active volcano, Aziraphale thought and considered it then a rather mean, inappropriate thought. Given the whole... damnation thing.

He left the phone where it had fallen and drifted on into the bedroom. Crowley had switched the reading lamp on and was now perched on his hip approximate dead centre of the small bed. The champagne bottle rested on the bedside table and the demon had set a thoughtful curl to his bottom lip.

"You really need to get a bigger bed, angel. I mean... if we're going to be sharing it now. See, I know you're _big_ on there being sides, right? So how's there supposed to be a side when the beds as small as this? I mean, I normally sleep on the left side-" He rolled dramatically to his left, like a lumbering seal lazing about on a beach and reclined there a moment on his stomach. "-but the left in this bed is pretty much the right of this bed anyway, isn't it?" He sat up, bearing that bright eyed over excited countenance of one who has clearly drunk too much and fairly much stalled the cleverer parts of their brain as a result. "Maybe that's apropos, no? Since we're our own side, all the sides combine and thus there is _no_ side. Only one side. _Our_ side." He sat a moment, reeling at his observations. "That's way too deep for this time of the morning."

He glanced over at Aziraphale finally and groaned to see the soppy expression on the angel's face; eyes shining from tears held barely suspended.

"Oh no. _Whaaat?_ You've got that stupid look on your face again. What is it?"

Aziraphale twisted the gold band about the length of his pinkie finger, tears welling so thickly between the bonds of his eyelids that his vision blurred for it. He couldn't understand why it was he was hesitating still. Crowley had always been the one to be so wonderfully heroic when it came to his affections.

He was the first to have referred to them as friends.

The first to have staged a rescue of his otherwise determined to be 'enemies' life. Or... corporeal existence, whatever you might choose to call it.

He had been the one to suggest that they run away together.

The first to have given further depth to the nature of their relationship in way of a kiss.

And now... now the very first to have said the words. The words, so simple and possessing yet a weight far greater than any other measurable substance in all of known existence.

It was something with which a demon ought to have struggled. It was not in their nature to love. And yet he was the one so brave, so unapologetic in expressing it. And an angel, who had struggled with not only the saying of it but in acknowledging the very existence of it.

"I... I love you too." Aziraphale said, a tear falling free from his right eye and landing upon his cheek. A sort of visual accompaniment to this; his much awaited surrender. Of the thing he knew to be true and incontestable and felt only the more of a coward for being able to confess now that he was otherwise free to do so.

He expected of Crowley a reaction quite as dramatic to that which the demon was readily accustomed. It was somewhat lacklustre, however; an annoyed sounding sigh, followed by Crowley flopping down into one of the three pillows and staring blankly with the one now visible eye.

"You listen to your messages?"

Aziraphale nodded, sliding a thumb across his cheek to clear away the tear still suspended there. Crowley's eye flinched shut and he groaned, burying his face into the pillow as though something otherwise terrible had come to pass.

"Oh, shit... _no, no, no, no_..."

"Why is that a problem?" Aziraphale asked, confused and a little annoyed. It had come from a very difficult place, his saying of those words and the reaction he was receiving did not do it quite the degree of justice he felt it otherwise deserved. "Don't tell me you were drunk when you sent it?"

"I was at _work_ Aziraphale; hardly likely I'd be drunk at work!"

"Well you can never quite tell with you." The angel observed rather the fairly. Crowley pulled himself back onto his side, feeling that this was not the sort of conversation one had whilst face down in a goose feather pillow. (Which seemed a little cruel for an angel to be purchasing, but moving along...)

"I'm just..." He trailed an itinerant finger across the quilt cover, attempting to put his drink affected thoughts into somehow the more sober sounding of words. "I'm annoyed because it... well it seems a bit anticlimactic, doesn't it? Six thousand years just to say it through a phone message and for you to... reciprocate while I'm... rolling around off my face in your bed..."

"Well I should hardly think that it matters how we say it. After all, this is just... putting words to what I think we both know full well we have been feeling for some time already." Aziraphale cocked his head to the side, offering the demon a kindly smile. "Don't you agree?"

"That's true. I guess." Crowley hesitated a moment before deciding to throw caution to the wind. Decisions, it seemed, were much easier when you were pissed to the eyeballs. "When uh... when, when, when did you uh... when did you know?"

Aziraphale did not have to cast his mind back far. The knowing for him was quite as concrete as the pathway what ran outside the borders of his shop. "I... well... I knew for certain back in 1945. Back in the... in the Church."

"When I redirected a bomb so you wouldn't embarrass your stupidly over trusting self by getting shot by some two-bit Nazi thugs?" Crowley thoughtfully embellished. Aziraphale rolled his eyes, grateful for it being spelt out quite as sensitively as it had.

"Rather more when you rescued the _books_." The distinction was enough to draw Crowley's eyes up sharply from the observations of his pointlessly twirling finger. "It was one thing to save me; both my human form and from the inordinate amount of paperwork I was likely to encounter once I'd been discorporated. But you saved the books." He wanted to make it unequivocally clear just why it had meant so much to him. Enough to have affirmed, beyond all particulars to the contrary, that he was very much in love with the demon and would remain quite as deeply in love for the countless years what were set to follow.

"It wasn't necessary for you to have done that. I know books mean nothing to you. Their value doesn't factor in so far as what you deem to be important. You rescued them because you knew that it meant something to _me_. That's when I realized." He had taken to pacing a little, in the small pocket of space what was available in the cosy bedroom. Crowley's eyes hung on his every movement, like a cat eyeing off a tantalizingly twitching bauble. "Your having stepped in all those times throughout history, coming to my aid, putting yourself at risk was not simply a means of meeting your own needs. Of having someone with whom to talk to, lighten the workload and share the passing of time. You cared for more than just that. You cared for me. You cared for my needs, you cared for those things that _I_ cared for. It was so ostensibly selfless, in such a way which only speaks of love."

He stopped pacing and looked towards Crowley. The demon whipped his face away, though not quickly enough to hide the welling of his eyes, the tears that were already pooling upon the rise of his cheeks. He wiped at them with the back of his hands, though it did little good. It was not sadness but an otherwise crippling happiness. For Aziraphale to finally acknowledge _out loud_ not only what Crowley had done but his reasons as to _why_ he had done these very things. There was little in the means of putting up a fight against a surge of emotion quite so strong as that.

"Ssshut up." He affectionately hissed, wrenching open a drawer on the bedside table and yanking out a rather hideous looking handkerchief with a tartan detail. He flapped it across his face with the veracity of an enraged moth before blowing his nose with an obnoxiously loud honk.

"Even that." Aziraphale chuckled, the strings of his heart thrumming with a tenderness so piquant it was nigh unbearable. "How shy you are with it all. I adore that. I adore _you_." His eyes welled again and he waved his fingertips towards them as though doing so might set them in place before they fell. "And the truth is," His voice caught, fractured and spilt through with emotion. "Standing there in that church I knew right then and there that I had loved you far longer than I had ever let myself believe. Perhaps that bomb blasted some sense into me, who's to say?"

They both laughed softly at this, and acknowledged that it was a relief to do so. To break up the otherwise overwhelming nature of their exchange.

"And you?" Aziraphale gave a slightly vulnerable smile. "Was there such a moment for you?"

Crowley pursed his lips, clearing up the last of the mess from his face with the garish handkerchief. "I ever... tell you what damnation felt like, angel?"

Aziraphale tried not to feel prematurely offended by where this unfavourable comparison was going. "Well... not off to a flattering start thus far."

"No, I wasn't... I wasn't trying to be funny. Do you remember?"

The angel cast his mind back. There were surprisingly few conversations centred on this particularly controvertible topic. Aziraphale for his part always considered it to be rather in bad taste to have made enquiries on the matter. Guilt played a large part in this, of course. He himself had been responsible for seeing quite a few of the rebelling angels into the Hell portal for subsequent damnation. And he was never entirely able to shake from his mind the eyes of the frightened cherubim; the one whose name he had never even known. The one who had genuinely seemed to have been guilty of only being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

He could still feel the grip of those desperate fingers. The fingers he had allowed to slip from between his own.

And the cruel, cowardice of those empty words. _'May we meet on a better occasion.'_

"Only that it was... painful." He said at last, having some vague recollection of a conversation tarried over an evening in which they had imbibed far the more heavily than usual. These were the most common occasion in which Crowley might have gotten to talking about things of which he felt a little more vulnerable. "Which I supposed to be something of an understatement."

Crowley took a few moments in which to collate his thoughts. It was an important thing to get right, to put into perspective so that Aziraphale could understand, even from the immeasurable distance what existed between their worlds, their experiences. To abbreviate it, would be to denounce it. And this was an example what could not be downplayed.

"The thing about damnation," He began. "Is that... it's not the... the pain which is the worst thing. That's distant. It dims compared to the burning away. You see, the burning hurts but... the thing about burning is that... it always eventually goes out. It runs out of stuff to burn. That's what the sulphur did. It burned up so much of us that there was nothing left inside by the time it went out. It took all of that light and warmth and natural effervescent love and it _burned_ it all away, Aziraphale. It gripped to it as though it were oxygen and just burned and burned and _burned_ until there was nothing left inside of us but ash."

His body gave an involuntary shudder. He did not like to think back on the memory, if he could help it. It was traumatic, more so than the word could do justice. He could only revisit such horrendous thoughts because it was Aziraphale to whom he was conveying them and he trusted and loved and _owed_ it to him to speak of it.

"What I wouldn't have given then to have _felt_ that burn again. Because after that... There was ... _nothing_. The cord which connected us to Heaven was severed and everything, _everything_ what had once been inside of us was _changed_. I don't expect you to ever have some understanding of what that could possibly feel like Aziraphale. I can't even begin to describe it for you, because I can't even say that it was a feeling. For so long there... there was nothing. No feelings, just... nothing. We drifted as ash. We were void. Breaking apart at the slightest touch and forced to reform, to reshape ourselves. All the while scrabbling, struggling, screaming without the knowing as to why even a scream was unnecessary. We were... numb. _I_ was numb. I was... nothing. Ash. Just ... _ash._ "

Crowley took up the bottle from the bedside table and swigged from it. The taste of the wine was reassuring; grounding. Evidence of _something_. He held the bottle out to Aziraphale, who raised a hand to decline it, gaze focused ever more intensely on Crowley; lines of sympathetic grief carving their paths across his ageless face. Crowley returned the bottle to its sentinel aside the reading lamp and its inadequately dim bulb and continued:

"Some of us _never_ recovered, either. Just a mess of shapes. _Ever-Void's_ , we call 'em. They just drift about aimlessly, bumping into one another in the halls. Unaware, unheeding, uncomprehending. All the senses blinded. I managed to crawl up out of it, eventually. Like dragging yourself out of a pool of tar, only to find the surface ain't much better. I got good though. Good at talking, good at spinning stories, lies. It was the only piece of enjoyment I could find in that shithole. Seeing if I could make folks fall again. Fall for whatever it was I was feeding them.

It was a bit of power, in a world where I had nothing, _felt_ nothing. They might have dragged me across the coals for it; certainly enough talk about ripping out my tongue so I couldn't lure another witless moron into making a blessed fool of themselves. But we always were a creative bunch; those of us what got ourselves damned. Perhaps they considered it worthwhile putting a clever tongue to bad use. More'n likely they just wanted me out from underfoot. Either way, that was to be my ticket up and out.

They sent me to the garden. First glimpse of anything what wasn't gloom and darkness, sneers and scratches. Verdant and rich and quivering with life, with purpose. Like a spit in the face, like... like a reminder of all that I had lost. All that I could never feel inside of myself again. Would that I could have at all registered what it was such pain felt like."

For the first time in some minutes, he smiled and Aziraphale thought it perhaps the saddest and at the same time most genuinely joyous smile he had ever seen upon the demon's usually doleful face.

"And then... _there_ you were. Like a warm crackle of a fire in a hearth on a winters night. I felt as though I had been wandering through that snowstorm for so long, Aziraphale; to where my fingers and feet were all beyond numb. Well... if I hadn't been a snake at the time. You know." They both chuckled briefly at this. "I had long accepted the fact that I would forever be devoid and lost and immovable. And then... before I had even _seen_ you, I _felt_ you. I felt your warmth and your light and whatever tiny seed of whatever it was what remained of me bloomed in that light and I... I went towards it, felt it expanding outward inside of me. The first _feeling_ I'd had in so very long, and..."

Crowley closed his eyes, drew a deep breath in. He could almost smell it again; the scent of the first rain. The clean, new, untainted aura of the angel. The perfume of a thousand blooming flowers, ripe fruits, of grass and leaves and broken twigs and damp dirt. Of new life. Of new _everything_.

"I hadn't _smiled_ in over a thousand years. I hadn't even _seen_ a smile in over a thousand years. That moment was the very first in an otherwise empty eternity in which I had not felt cold and void and _lost_. I knew then, that I needed to do whatever it took to see you again. To keep that feeling alive, to nurture that tiny, infinitesimal grain what was a seed inside of me; the only part of me that had not been burned away. I was _consumed_ by the feeling and the need for it. How could I not help but _love_ you for that? You _rescued_ me from absolute desolation."

He looked up into Aziraphale's eyes, both quite as overcome as the next. "I've fallen once already in my life, angel. That's not how it was with you. There was _you_. And that ever so slow saunter ever further downwards into love. More and more and ever more by the day."

Aziraphale softly gasped, unaware until that moment that he had been holding his breath. He could barely trust himself to speak. Never before had he felt so completely undone, so overwhelmed by grief, by sadness, by _love_.

"Oh, my dear..." He whispered, crossing to the bed and reaching down to take Crowley's face between his hands. He kissed him deeply, felt Crowley press his palm to the back of his neck and ease them ever the closer together. " _My love.._."

He kissed the tears from his cheeks. They tasted much as he imagined they might; but were indescribably more intoxicating than the wine of which earlier partook.

"I'm sorry it's not more dramatic." Crowley murmured, head tilted back to accommodate the much welcomed and impassioned touches. "Should be some sweeping declaration, some grand gesture..."

"You have _made_ those grand gestures, my darling." Aziraphale assured him, lending his lips now to the cursed marking upon the side of Crowley's face. The mark of the snake what the sulphur had ascribed to his inner most being. "I was simply too stupid and stubborn to accept them, to _know_ them for what they were."

"It's okay. It's all turned out for the best." He smiled once more that truest most impart of pure happiness, stroking a hand over Aziraphale's face. Taking forehead, temple and the curve of his cheek into that one loving caress. "We're on the same shore now. Looking out over the same view. _After all this time.._."

"Yes. The same shore." Aziraphale chuckled, somewhat self-mockingly. "Well, I'll be damned."

"Would it be so bad if you were?"

"I..." Aziraphale perched himself on the bed, the demons earlier words coming back to haunt the hallways of his mind. "I don't know what to say. To say that I am 'Sorry' seems awfully inadequate, but..." He placed his palm to the side of Crowley's neck, felt the shallow intake of unneeded breath, still heavy, pitching the column of his throat up into his grip. "I am sorry. For my part in it. Truly sorry. To feel nothing... absolutely _nothing_ for so long... I can't imagine a fate more terrifying than that."

Crowley gave the sort of half-hearted 'huff' what was typical of him. "There wasn't so much as terror. Or sadness. Or grief. Just that void... I couldn't even comprehend just how abysmal it was until I had crawled out from under it. Until I felt your warmth. Only then did I truly get an idea of what I had lost. Saw in contrast all that I might possibly attain."

He stretched his hand up, once as he might have done when reaching for an unheeding Heaven and slipped his fingers about the back of Aziraphale's neck; pulling him down to where their lips could once again meet. The kiss was deep, as deep as the darkness into which he had once fallen, but warmer than the world's first sun and lingering in a way what made the insurmountable and absolute nothingness of damnation dim by comparison.

And in the swamp of his alcohol suffused mind, Crowley felt the irresistible pull of a more base and primitive desire and broke from the kiss so as to lend his lips to the shell of Aziraphale's ear.

_"Lay with me, angel."_

**~X~**

* * *


	27. Or, in which an an angel wavers.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something was on Gabriel's mind. Something for the once, not related to his recent troubling considerations where the Vices and Virtues were concerned.
> 
> He had been muddling over the exchange between Aziraphale and Crowley since the day before. It had all been troubling and rather the more food for thought. But something about it kept snagging at a corner of his mind; like a toenail improperly clipped and lending itself to whatever fabric might otherwise be draped upon it.
> 
> It took him some time, in fact, to clue onto what it was he was that appeared particularly out of sorts.
> 
> Sunshine.
> 
> "Go back to Heaven, sunshine..."

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Tuesday, April 9th - 2019~** _

_**A.Z Fell & Co, London's Soho... ** _

Aziraphale was ever the more relieved that he had sobered up when he had. The sensual utterance was close enough to undoing him as was. Presided over by the freewheeling effects of alcohol, he might very well have surrendered.

"Crowley..."

He felt the demons lips at the column of his throat now, the caress of his hand upon the plain of his thigh. It had the signature sloppy overture of intoxication written all over it, but lacked nothing of the passion and need what Crowley clearly felt in his core. His core and... well, other places, obviously.

"Let me feel your warmth take possession of me. Encompass me from all sides. Touch every dark and cold corner of my body and soul." He kissed the corner of Aziraphale's mouth; continuing to sing those soft notes of temptation what had been a knowing of his nature since before even the time of his transgression. His hand grazed down the front of Aziraphale's vest, hooked about a button and lightly tugged. "I know you want to... Your desire. I can _feel_ it..."

A human might very well have found this display an impossible one to resist. Aziraphale himself very nearly succumbed, in fact. But there were ever the more important things to consider and one of them was not immediate physical gratification.

The desire was quite a true thing; Aziraphale felt it taking hold of his body in a way that he was not altogether accustomed to. It would have been... wondrous to have given in to it. He had little idea as to what to expect, but from what he had read and observed in the passing of years, he understood it to be an experience unrivalled so far as a visceral affairs were concerned.

And six thousand years was certainly quite enough build up to contribute to what he was certain would be an incomparable culmination of passion.

But the timing wasn't right. Not when taking other variables into consideration. And that was one thing of which Aziraphale did and could do well. It was one of the myriad of reasons as to why he could pass as a gentleman so affluently.

"My dear..." He reached down, taking Crowley's hand off of his chest and squeezing his fingers softly. "You are sad and you have had far too much to drink. Perhaps you ought to sober up?"

"I don't wanna sober up." Crowley groaned, dropping the back of his head so that it rested flush with Aziraphale's thigh. "I'll be too shy then."

"And you will no doubt be capable of making much cleverer decisions."

"Going to bed with you _is_ a clever decision." He made one more attempt at it, reaching up to plant a lingering kiss to the underside of Aziraphale's chin, voice dropping to that cadence which he was so accustomed to wrangling results from. _"Are you saying you don't want to?"_

Aziraphale would be lying if he'd said he had not reconsidered his decision in that very moment. "Of course I do, my darling but I would much rather... proceed when the both of us are more the present for it. Wouldn't you?"

Crowley thought on this, head bobbing from side to side in a not so entirely convinced manner. "You mean like uh... _completely_ sober? Not even one drink? Just... clear eyed and clear headed?" His eyes widened at the thought of being his complete sober and more often than not nervous self at the moment of truth. "Not even a _snifter_ of Dutch courage?"

"Not to that extreme, _no_. Just... not acting off of otherwise extenuating circumstances." Aziraphale tapped a finger to the tip of Crowley's straight nose. "And not acting on the drunken spur of the moment when you're unlikely to remember quite what it was you did the night before and who it might very well have been with."

"It would have been with _you_!" Crowley snapped, so offended by the choice of words that he managed to struggle partway up. "It was only always _ever_ going to be with you! Been drunk a lot over six thousand years and haven't managed to jump into bed with any old Tom, Dick and Harry just yet. In spite of the sometimes awkwardly insistent offers from Tom, Dick and or..." He struggled a moment to remember the name of the hypothetical third would-be lover. "...Harry..."

Aziraphale laughed, scooting himself up fully onto the bed and resting his back against the headboard. Turning his body about at the waist for so long, had been rather more the discomfort than he could otherwise continue to tolerate.

"Yes. How _dreadfully_ inconvenient for you; having to drift through human history looking so gorgeous."

"Like you can talk. You have the nicest set of teeth in all the world. And your eyes are lovely. And..." Crowley was quite a ways drunk and was more prone to becoming emotional as a result. He was doing so now, reaching over to press his hand to Aziraphale's plump stomach a few times. "... and I _like_ your squishy, little belly."

"Oh, thank you dear." Said Aziraphale, really rather wishing that Crowley would stop applying pressure to a part of his body that was already uncomfortably full. He would work a belch out, if he wasn't careful and that was hardly in the spirit of being the gentleman he supposed himself to be.

It hardly added to the otherwise romantic tone of the evening, as well.

"You're so soft. And you're nice to cuddle. I just wanna..." Crowley dragged himself up the bed with all the grace of a wet mop and dropped the side of his head down to rest against the angels thighs. "-wrap myself around you like you're a stripper pole. A soft, cuddly strippers pole."

"Well that's... that's very sweet." Said Aziraphale, a little perplexed. He brushed his fingers through the line of hair above Crowley's temple. The demon closed his eyes. There hadn't been enough of that, these past few months. The angels sometimes near overbearing coddling. The touches, the embraces. He had missed it terribly and was just drunk enough so as to not feel too ashamed to acknowledge it.

"Did you know," He muttered, feeling dozy as the fingers made their continued caresses through his hair. "-that I'm actually pretty bloody good on a strippers pole? Must be the snake thing, I guess. Went to some club with the girls when we weren't talking and they had a strippers pole there on some sort of little podium thing. Showed 'em all up. You would have been _so_ proud."

"Of course," said Aziraphale, seriously. "Nothing could have made me prouder but to see the demon I love in his human body what appears to be that of a man in his mid forties, swinging about on a strippers pole."

_Fuck off mid-forties,_ Crowley felt like saying but was rendered ever the more docile by the moment by the repeated attentions to his hair. Lucky for Aziraphale.

"It doesn't pair so well with leather pants though." He said instead, in the sort of hushed undertone a Russian attaché might have enforced whilst feeding the ducks down at St James's River. "The strippers pole. Kinda got stuck a couple of times. Had to rub baby rash lotion on my inside thighs when I got home."

The image was quite enough to set the two of them to laughing. Crowley inched a little further up Aziraphale's thighs, with the intention alone of being able to put an arm about his midsection.

"Angel?"

"Yes, my wily pole dancing serpent?"

It was an important question to ask. Perhaps not quite as important where everything else was concerned but one which Crowley would be lying about, if he said he did not place some importance in the answer.

"Do you think you might... want to, one day? You know..."

"Take pole dancing lessons?" Aziraphale made rather the show out of seeming to genuinely consider this one at length. "Well, I have rather been meaning to find something to fill the void since the gavotte went out of style."

Crowley groaned, twisting about so as to cast his exasperated gaze towards the ceiling. "Please don't put that image of you pole dancing in my head when I'm trying to behave myself."

"If it helps, imagine me doing it in skin tight fluorescent Lycra and the roof caving in after I attempt my first manoeuvre."

Crowley lost himself once more to uncontrollably snickering. Aziraphale joined in after a moment and it was that very laughter what felt ever the more good for the pain it left in your cheeks and your stomach. It had been quite a while since they had laughed like that together. The night, in fact, had been replete with such moments of mirth and it was a very fine thing, in making up for two months of silent sorrow.

"Oh, shit... _No._ " The demon managed to at long last say with some firmness. It took a while still to wring the giggling out of his own voice. "No, I meant... do you think you might one day want to... you know?" He rolled his shoulder back, looking a little awkward. "Make love? With me?"

Aziraphale thought to have a little fun; because it was quite true that in not so distant days, Crowley would very well have jumped on him for grammatically less. "Well, I'm terribly glad you went to the effort of adding the 'with me' there. Otherwise I might have thought you meant with my barber." Crowley frowned, glancing the back of his hand to Aziraphale's belly. The angel laughed softly, taking up his wrist and passing his thumb tenderly across the plain of it. Massaging each of his tired fingers one at a satisfying time. "It may... take some time but... yes. Yes, I do. From that moment we shared our first little hug all those months ago, it was as though something awakened inside of me. Did you feel that too?"

"I did. I felt your _warmth_." Crowley sighed, closing his eyes a moment. The massages to each of his sore fingers felt utterly sublime. "I felt it blossom."

"At first I thought it was something I needed to fight back against." The angel admitted. Felt the better _for_ admitting it. "But as time went on it... well... the feeling became almost... irresistible..."

"Well, of _course_. I mean, look at me." Crowley made rather the song and dance of twirling his head about, as though he were a female celebrity preening for her gawking fanbase. Aziraphale was aware however, that Crowley often had misconceptions concerning his appearance. It was true that he was incredibly fond of what he referred to as his 'favourite form' and revelled in the attention it oftentimes wrought him. But in a lot of other ways, Aziraphale thought him to be contrarily insecure about his appearance.

Which was not so difficult to understand. Attraction was not so straight forward when it came to angels and demons. They judged such matters quite differently than humans did. In one particularly inebriated exchange, Crowley had once confessed to Aziraphale that he considered him to be the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in all the days of his existence. The angel understood this to very much the truth of how Crowley actually felt. He did not agree with it, but he did not denounce the demon's interpretation and rather took it as the astonishing compliment that it was.

Aziraphale cupped a hand about Crowley's face, caressing his thumb over his cheekbones. It was still very much an unfamiliar and frightening thing; to give credence to base human attraction as though it were inherently worth something. But Crowley had been so courageously transparent with him in the past; what else could he do but to return that honesty in kind?

"Joke as you may, I have always found your appearance lovely, my dear. From both a human perspective and from a spiritual one. It is still..." He paused as a sharpness lent itself to the corners of his spirt. He shrugged it off as best he could. "It is still... a little difficult to reconcile the feelings I have concerning you which are not entirely rooted in... love."

"You mean the... the physical feelings?"

"... Today, I..." Aziraphale cleared his throat, reminding himself that he had vowed to be upfront. "When you were walking ahead of me in the halls, I found myself... well, I found myself... _admiring_ you."

Crowley had a smug look on his face. "Of course. I'm an admirable creature. Such extenuating kindness from a demon what might otherwise have thrown a bucket of cold water onto a bunch of old farts rather than changing their dirty bed linen and spoon feeding them sprouts."

"Not... admiring of your character. I have long since loved you for that. What I mean to say is that... I was admiring your... your physicality." His hand seemed to move quite outside of his conscious directives, tracing the tips of his fingers over the side of Crowley's thigh, down towards his knee. The silk sensually eased the transition and Aziraphale wondered a moment what it must have felt like against Crowley's skin.

"Your long... _legs_." He murmured, grazing his fingers back up along the materials seam. "The sway of your hips..." He pushed his hand into the curve of Crowley's back; that indent he had come to know from their exchange of passion in the break room. "-the pinch of your narrow waist, the..." His hand slid further, curling about Crowley's left buttock. His breath tightened in his chest, his arousal fluttering back to the forefront of his senses as he softly squeezed. _Was this really him?_ "... the curve of that perfect bottom..."

Crowley stared up at him with heavy lidded eyes, breath deepening with arousal. His fingers snaked their way back up the angels chest, drawing himself in as the hand on his backside flexed and tightened further still.

"You're... seriously going to do all this shit and you're _not_ going to fuck me?"

It could not have been more effective than if Crowley had taken Aziraphale's libido and submerged it in ice water. The angel whipped his hand back, as though having only just realized where it had been and turned his face away. He pressed his lips together, brows furrowed so that his distaste was all the more evident.

"Please don't use that word." There was no question to it. Though Aziraphale himself had trotted it out perhaps once or twice only in his sixty centuries of existence, he could not abide it being used in reference to whatever the two of them might share. It... denigrated the act. Made it sound cheap and _vulgar_.

Fuck was a... horrible word. Awful enough when used simply to vent your frustration. Quite another as a means to reference an otherwise loving and sacred act.

To... fuck, seemed all too much an exchange devoid of deeper feeling. Of love. As though you might be just as content to drive yourself into the hollow trunk of a tree, as you would the receptacle of your lover. What reverence was there in _that_? Of slathering, base, primordial instinct?

"I'm... I'm sorry," Crowley was sitting up, his wide eyes softly beseeching clemency on the part of his mouth. "I... wasn't thinking... You had your hand on my arse, I was just kind of... going with the flow..."

Aziraphale sighed, acknowledging that this was yet another restriction that was largely of his own making. He reminded himself to not take it out on Crowley, who was simply permitting himself to speak freely and to take pleasure in that which they were sharing.

"No, _I'm_ sorry. I'm being very confusing, I know." He put the backs of his fingers to Crowley's cheek and traced them down to his chin, warming to see how the demon looked to sink into the touch. "That's the thing, you see. And you were quite right all those years ago when you said that I was lying. I do have urges. I have urges so far as _you_ are concerned. Nothing quite like what I have been experiencing lately. I haven't allowed the thoughts to get that far." He stinted on it a moment, but decided to go ahead and ask all the same. Well, they had come this far. "It's... it's been some time since we last spoke about this, but... have you...?"

"Have I _what?_ ..." Crowley thought on this a moment and then his bottom lip dropped a moment as he got the meaning. "Oh. Sex. Have I had sex with anyone?"

Aziraphale responded with a slight nod, wondering even as he did why he had taken to biting his lip. Would it have changed anything if Crowley replied that he _had_ engaged in sexual activity with another person? Would it change anything so far as Aziraphale's desire to share in the same act with him?

Aziraphale hoped he was good enough, in love enough and secure enough for this to be true.

Crowley, for his part, looked more exhausted than he had the entire night. "The fact that you need to ask that in the first place... You _know_ how I feel about having sex with humans. The only person I've ever had sex with is myself. Or... my left and right hand intermittently. Point is -" He leaned in slowly, waiting to see whether the angel might choose to shy away and when it did not transpire, pressed a kiss to to his mouth. "- no. I am, as I have always been since the moment I slithered up into this wonderful, terrible world six thousand years ago, touched by only myself and by... yourself. Exempting... you know, a scruffing here and there and a punch in the face and kick in the pants - but the nice, proper, lovely touching is... it's all _you_ , sweetheart." He kissed him again, smiling. "Just _you_."

They spent a while, indulging in the feather light caress of one another's faces. It reminded Crowley again that he really needed to take some time out (preferably sober time) in which to take a look at Aziraphale's wings. They must have been a fright. It made him shiver to think of all the feather plucking, picking and scratching he was likely to be in for. Just about as good as he imagined sex might have otherwise been.

"You'll be the first. We'll be... each other's firsts." He sat back a little, giving Aziraphale a coy look. " _Unless...?_ "

The angel scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. "Oh, don't be so silly. Exempting the passing of a kiss here and there when I danced the gavotte, you shall be the first for me in most... well, come to think of it... _any_ respect. So far as... all _that_ goes." He watched as Crowley, apparently worn out from the modest task of sitting upright, contented himself with curling up on Aziraphale's lap once may. "May I... ask you something else?"

"Angel, you could ask me anything right now and I would pony up the deepest of the darkest secrets of what ever I might otherwise seek to be concealing with a smile on my face and a dance in my heart." Crowley gave a series of indeterminable tapping motions with his feet, before crossing them at the ankle and smirking up into Aziraphale's expectant face. "Ask away."

"When we uh... come together..." He noticed the smile widening on Crowley's face and paused. "What?"

"You said ' _when'._ "

"Well... of course I said 'when'. I just said that I intend for it to happen."

"Sorry, it's just... it's still taking some time to get... used to it." He gestured for the angel to continue speaking. "Go on."

"Well... _when_ -" They could not help but share a dualistically pleased smile at this. "-we do... come together... do you intend to uh... remain as you... are?"

Crowley of course had some understanding right away as to where Aziraphale was coming from.

"In a male body, you mean?"

Aziraphale nodded.

"The form for me is largely immaterial, angel. That being said, I have presented predominantly as male for so many centuries now. Switching over to female as is required for the odd job here and there." He gave a shrug of one of his shoulders, more the unconcerned with such a facet as gender assignment than a human could ever obviously be. "Still I would be... comfortable... to be whatever it was that you yourself felt most at ease with. Trouser situation wise, I mean." He added, smacking the side of his hand to his upper thigh as though a visual demonstration was somehow required.

Aziraphale tutted thoughtfully, casting his gaze towards the ceiling. "Well, I would hardly know what it is that I would be at ease with. My feelings of attraction are holistically concentrated towards you, not towards males or females. Or... the various representations therein between. I don't know. What would _you_ feel most at ease with?"

Crowley looked up at him with a somewhat devious smile. "I like how you haven't a thought as to perhaps switching over yourself so as to accommodate _me_." He said with a wink and Aziraphale went to immediate water in his not having considered such an obvious matter.

"Oh. Oh I _am_ sorry." He avowed, brushing his fingers back through the crown of the demons hair; thumb making circles across his cheeks and temples. "I didn't mean to be inconsiderate, my dear. It's just that... well I _have_ lived as a man for the entirety of the time I've been on earth and... well I... I can only suppose I would make for a very confusing, unconventional looking woman, if I were to in fact dabble on that side of the spectrum. Though, I suppose it stands to reason that there _have_ in fact been more the bizarre looking women... Yet you understand full well my long standing, thusly substantiated fears concerning high heels and panty-hose-"

Crowley ceased Aziraphale's babbling by reaching up and cupping a hand to the back of his neck. "I was teasing, angel." He gave him a kiss, smiling devilishly as he eased back down into his warm nook. "For my money I figure, why bother switching over to a woman so as to fulfil some ages old human based agenda, which is considerably outdated in the time in which we're currently existing? Not to mention the running the risk of... pregnancy."

This was enough to shock them both stock still. Just the thought of an offspring wrought of the union between an angel and demon... they'd had quite enough of the last Apocalypse to last them a while. No sense in contributing to bringing about the next one.

Crowley gave his head a shake, as though it were the screen of an Etch-a-sketch, and continued: "I've chosen to live in this world as a male, as have you, and we have come to love one another in the bodies that we have chosen. I mean," He gave Aziraphale a coy, knowing look. "Clearly you _enjoy_ this body. Would you enjoy it quite as much if it were a human females?"

Aziraphale sent his mind traipsing back over a collective number of centuries spent in the demon's company. "Well... I have seen you as such in times past but... I do confess that I... that when you present as male, I have..." He looked rather coquettish in admitting it. "Enjoyed it more..." He brushed his fingers back through Crowley's hair, admiring the way that the dark red strands shifted and bent back into place to follow the direction of the pores from which they sprang. "I have especially enjoyed it these past twelve or so years..."

"Oh, yes?"

"The twenty-first century agrees with you. Though I do acknowledge you looked astonishingly beautiful when your hair was long." He skimmed his fingertips over those cheekbones once more. "You simply have... that perfectly exquisite bone structure. Any hairstyle looks beautiful on you."

"Even the seventies?"

Aziraphale could not help but pull a face at this one. "That was more the, uh..." He flicked a finger against his upper lip. "-the moustache."

"It was in style." Said Crowley, perhaps a little defensively. He thought it had looked good.

"It wasn't to _your_ style." Aziraphale passed his fingers back through Crowley's hair again. It was starting to look a little untidy, due to the repeated attentions. "I like it at this length."

"Ah?" Crowley purred, not really paying all that much attention. He was feeling ever so relaxed and attended to and it was a glorious feeling. Perhaps just as good a turn out, as their having sex might have been. ... Maybe.

"It looks ever so smart. Highlights your cheek bones. Brings out your eyes. When you take those dreadful glasses off, that is."

"Is there a point to this?" Crowley murmured, turning sleepily onto his side and sliding his arm over Aziraphale's lap. "Or were you just settling in to fawn all over me all night? Because if so, I reckon I can probably take it."

"I suppose the point being is... that you would feel... comfortable remaining as a man... when we are... intimate?"

Crowley thought it a good idea to make some eye contact where this was concerned and managed to wrench his lids open just enough so as to focus them on the angel's face.

"I would be... comfortable. Would you...?"

Aziraphale lifted Crowley's chin. "So long as I can gaze into those beautiful eyes..." He said, dispensing a soft kiss to his lips. "What does it matter what's going on down below?"

"You say that now..." Crowley murmured, pressing himself up into the kiss, pinning an arm about Aziraphale's shoulders to keep him there. He groaned at the too soon parting of their lips, sinking back down into Aziraphale's thigh and glancing a fingernail against one of the buttons of his vest with a sort of lazy suggestiveness. "Are you sure you don't want to-?"

Aziraphale cleared his throat, passing his hands up underneath Crowley's head and gently levering it down onto the duvet. "Well, I'd best be getting ready for bed. There's much to do come tomorrow. And judging from those bags beneath your eyes, your body is well in need of a good rest." He climbed up off of the bed, ignoring Crowley's not so subtle groans as he did and crossed to where he had set his pyjamas, neatly folded as always, in one of the corners decorative chairs. "Won't be but a moment."

Crowley offered a patently unimpressed scoff as he rolled his torpid body back over to where the bottle of champagne was resting and took another generous nip.

"Are you _seriously_ going into the ensuite to change? Just change here. I've seen you naked before, remember? And due to an unfortunate sleep deprived accident executed on behalf of yours truly, you've seen me naked now, as well." He flashed a wink as Aziraphale gave himself over to uncontrollable blushing at the memory." No shame in it."

"I only saw you naked from the back, my dear and that's hardly the point."

"What is the point, then? Angel, we kissed today, we just declared our bloody love, established the fact that we're likely to be doing it any day now and I'm sleeping in your teeny tiny kids sized bed tonight." Crowley rolled over onto his belly, feet kicked up as though he were at a girls slumber party and sucked back again from the quickly dwindling bottle of bubbly. Aziraphale rather supposed he wasn't in need of much more, but when had the demon ever taken to good advice when it was offered? "You really think getting changed in front of me is where the line in the sand needs to be drawn?"

"It's just that... well, I simply mean to say that I..." Aziraphale thought about it a moment, realized that the reasons were, as Crowley had indicated, void of much substantial reasoning now and dumped his pyjamas back into the corner chair. "Oh, sod it." He grunted, reaching up to all but wrest his bow tie off of his neck. "Very well. I will undress in front of you." He whipped the bow tie free, almost lopping his head clean from his neck in the process and slapped his shoe down onto the chair, reaching down to yank apart the lasses with the sort of aggressive veracity a sleep deprived, alcoholic social worker dispenses upon whoever might be the first hapless person to call the office when they arrive of a Monday morning. "I hope that you are happy."

"Well, you're really rather taking the joy out of it what with the hostile attitude angel." Crowley observed, with an unconvinced wrinkling of both brow and lip. He eased the palm of his free hand down through the air. "Slow down a bit with the socks. Maybe sit on the chair. Peel them off." He demonstrated by making a gesture above his head; as though he were a cowboy about to lasso a particularly obstinate steer. "Give them a little twirl, you know."

"I'll do no such thing. Don't be so ridiculous." Aziraphale grumbled. "And would you stop watching so closely?!" He snapped, catching a glimpse of Crowley's saucer like eyes staring at him somehow all the more piercingly than usual.

"Well, you do put on quite a show." Crowley frowned, gesturing to Aziraphale's now mostly bare legs with the neck of the champagne bottle. "You actually wear sock suspenders?"

"To keep my socks from falling down." Aziraphale said, unhooking said suspenders and wondering as he did why he had felt the need to explain their existence at all. They were a commonly encountered clothing article, were they not?

"... why not just buy socks with elastic in them like mine?" Crowley twisted over so that he was lying on his back, raising one of his legs and grabbing his ankle with the hand what wasn't occupied with the champagne bottle. He levered it down so that his thigh rested flush with his chest and stomach, wriggling his foot from side to side so that Aziraphale could see the sock that adorned it. "See? These bad boys _never_ fall down. Unlike _moi._ "

"Too tight an elastic can have an effect on the circulation and-" Aziraphale forget what it was he had been lecturing Crowley with as he took notice, for the first time, of the angle of his leg. "Good Lord... how do you get your leg that far back without bending your knee?"

"Well, I _was_ a snake. Why?" Crowley lolled his head over the back of the bed, flashing a wink at Aziraphale that was laced with not so subtle meaning. "Giving you idea's?"

"Oh, don't be so crude. I'm simply wishing I had anywhere near as much flexibility for when I was learning the gavotte. You would have been a shoe in, if you'd ever deigned to have joined me for classes every once in a while."

"I did show up once, remember?" Crowley said, dropping his leg back onto the bed. He eased himself over to rest on his stomach again. "Your discreet 'gentlemen' just about tore my clothes off."

"You're exaggerating."

" _Exaggerating_? Those sex-deprived bastards ruined a perfectly good cummerbund. How you ever got in and out of that place with your virginity intact is a never ceasing mystery so far as I'm concerned."

Aziraphale tutted softly, stepping out of his trousers and draping them over the back of the chair. "Oh, really. It was a place where people came together to dance and to socialize." He started to unbutton his vest. "You really do see the worst in everything."

"Yeah. _Dance in each others pants, more like_." Crowley felt a lump form in his throat, quite unbidden as Aziraphale shrugged off his vest and got to work on the buttons of his shirt. He was standing there in his boxers, with a small inch of singlet getting more the visible by the moment. Crowley found himself glancing up and towards the ceiling, chugging back a bit more of what little remained of the champagne. The sight was enough to send Aziraphale to chuckling.

"Anthony J. Crowley, if I didn't know any better, I would swear that you're blushing right now." He teased, removing his shirt and placing it over top of his slacks before reaching down to fetch up his pyjama top.

"Not blushing." Crowley protested, reaching up to rub a fingertip to his left eyelid. "Just got something in my eye."

"...Blushing isn't a result of having something in your eye, dear."

"Is when it's your near naked body that's in my eye."

Aziraphale sighed with well practiced tolerance, slipping his arms through the sleeves of his pyjama top and affixing the buttons neatly from the collar down.

"And here was you saying that you had showered in my body without any problems whatsoever."

"Who's saying I didn't have problems?" Crowley said, quirking one of his brows tellingly. "Like I said, I washed and got _out_! With perhaps a... few more questions than when I got _into_ the shower with, but still..."

"Oh, hush." Aziraphale grumbled, trying through pure force of will alone to push the blood back out of his cheeks. He could tell just from the heat concentrated about his neck alone that it was not at all going according to plan.

"Question's such as; which bloody lines were you standing in when they handed out stuff in heaven, angel? I mean... did you accidentally stray into the line what was reserved exclusively for mules, given the uh... you know the..."

He gestured towards Aziraphale in a vague manner which nonetheless made the angel feel altogether relieved that he had long since stepped into his pyjama pants. The reference however was quite enough he felt to potentially burst a number of otherwise useful capillaries in his nose.

"I said, _hush_!" He snapped, doing up the last button on his pyjama top and double checking to ensure his singlet was tucked neatly into his pants. "My goodness. If you weren't a foul fiend prior to tonight, than you most certainly are now." Aziraphale picked up his clothes from the chair, replacing what items did not require washing into the drawers long since designated their home and hanging his cardigan on a useful hook affixed to the back of the door. He gestured towards the ensuite. "I'm going to go and brush my teeth."

"Yeah, well, you have fun with that." Crowley gave yet another lion like yawn which looked as though it might have unhinged his jaw in the process. "I'm going to sleep."

"Have you brushed yours?" Aziraphale asked, fairly certain he already knew the answer. Crowley, having set the champagne bottle back onto the bedside table, flopped dead centre on the flower patterned duvet, arms and legs akimbo and face just about smothered by the inordinately palatial pillows.

"I'm almost asleep now..." He murmured, and though it would hardly have been a surprise for the demon to have nodded off in such spectacularly short order, the very fact that he had called out was not about to be convincing anyone.

"Crowley."

Crowley groaned, turning his head another quarter of an inch so that his face was now properly buried in the pillow. "I'm a demon. What answer might you otherwise be expecting apart from a 'no'?'" Came his considerably muffled reply. Aziraphale responded by crossing to the bed, reaching out with his spare hand and grabbing said demon by one of his narrow ankles.

"Come and brush your teeth." He gave a hard tug, which yanked Crowley just about all the way down off of the bed. Aziraphale was in fact quite a great deal stronger than he appeared. Something Crowley knew well but it didn't stop him from turning and hissing abuse over his shoulder as he was inelegantly dragged across the coverlet. "You've been drinking champagne and all that sugar will wreck havoc on your enamel."

Crowley made a gesture towards his mouth with his index finger and Aziraphale gave his leg another firm yank to pull whatever he intended up short.

"No, not with your magic! You're the one who's been rabbiting on about us preserving our energy, come into the bathroom and brush them properly. Won't take but a moment."

"I didn't bring a toothbrush." Crowley sulked, both legs now hanging completely off of the back of the bed, knees resting on the floor. He maintained a grip on the bedspread, for whatever good that had done. Half the upper layers of sheets and blankets were now exposed, as though the bed itself had been partially flayed.

Aziraphale gave the back of Crowley's mussed head the sort of look which suggested he was the one now being more than a little vague. "...I think given the circumstances it would hardly be untoward if you were to use mine."

"But I'm tired." The demon groaned, hiking one knee back up atop the bed and sprawling out across the base of it with all the natural refined repose what one expects to encounter with an overtired lush. Aziraphale reached down and smacked his palm to the demon's buttock, earning a soft _'Ooch'_ in response.

" _Now._ " He said, hooking a finger through the elastic of Crowley's pyjama pants and yanking upward sharply. The demon quickly came along for the ride, clearly not the least interested in being on the receiving end of a wedgie and slumped along behind Aziraphale towards the ensuite, groaning disparagingly the whole while.

He perched, cross legged and sleepy eyed on the closed toilet, offloading yawn after yawn as Aziraphale brushed and flossed his teeth. When finished, the angel rounded off with some mouth wash, gave the toothbrush a good proper rinsing and then added a worm of toothpaste from two separate tubes nonetheless, to the bristles.

"Here. I've added some whitening. Goodness knows you'll need it now you've started smoking again."

Crowley slumped to the sink, dropping his bottom lip and jamming the toothbrush so deeply into his mouth Aziraphale was surprised he didn't choke himself with the thing. He must not have used one in some time (more the likely favouring the use of magic to keep his teeth looking healthy) because he looked to be struggling with it; sometimes jamming the head of the brush painfully between his upper lip and gums, twisting it about so that it faced the wrong way or on one or two occasions, brushing with it vertically. There was a good deal of foamy paste going most everywhere, so that Crowley was starting to resemble a rabid dog chewing on a seltzer tablet.

"Make sure and get some of that grime off of your tongue while you're there." Aziraphale pointed to his own tongue as some unneeded indication as to what in fact a tongue was. "You've got a bit of build up, I noticed."

Crowley dutifully lolled his tongue out of his mouth like so much carpet being unspooled along a hallway. A wave of foam came billowing out over his lower lip, sloughing down across his chin and splattering into the base of the sink.

" _Blaaaargh._ " He grunted, scrubbing the bristles of the brush wildly across his tongue, sending spatters of foamy residue and tar infused build up spritzing in all directions. Aziraphale, face pinched in disgust, backed up a good two steps to avoid the worst of it.

"Goodness, you're disgusting."

"Yeah, but you _love_ this disgusting." Crowley reminded him, turning and puckering foamy lips at Aziraphale; chin and cheeks and even the tip of his nose dripping with minty residue. The angel responded by stepping well out of grabbing range.

"I'll see you in bed." He said, closing the lid of the laundry hamper as he made his way back out into the bedroom proper.

Crowley finished brushing his teeth, eschewing dental floss and mouth wash (because hey, he was still a demon at days end) and made use of the lavatory before switching off the light and slinking back out into the bedroom. Aziraphale had perched himself up in the bed, reading glasses on and book in hand. He had positioned himself as far to the right as he possibly could, giving Crowley some room to be able to squeeze in on the left.

They stared at one another; sharing a short, mutually nervous exchange. Understanding of course, that though this was not the first time they had shared a bed, it was the first time they had shared a bed as... well, whatever it was you might choose to call them now. Lovers? Crowley wasn't certain. Were you only supposed to use that term when you were _actually_ making love to one another?

Crowley decided it really didn't matter. Categorizing things wasn't important, not really. They loved one another, that was what mattered. And he was exhausted; or at least his human body was instructing him to feel as such. Such weariness went above and beyond all that nervous, jittery adolescent nonsense.

"I'm just gonna..." He slunk up to the base of the bed, crawling on his hands and knees to where the pillows rested. "... slide in here..." He lifted the sheets and coverlet, since set to rights by Aziraphale's fastidious hands and wriggled on down like a sausage squeezing itself into its skin. He spun over onto his side, facing towards the angel. Crowley could feel the warmth emanating from his body, which had always been appreciated but ever the more so on a relatively cool night. "You going to freak out if I put my arm around you? Gotta keep myself from rolling out of the bed somehow. And, you know... no Viagra around to chock..."

"Of course not." Aziraphale said with a smile, which was a great deal more accommodating than he had been so many months earlier, when Crowley was in the depths of his cuddling addiction. He petted a hand against his stomach. "You make yourself comfortable."

Crowley went ahead and did just what Aziraphale had suggested; wrapping an arm snug about the angel's midsection and scooping both legs in around Aziraphale's as though he were a sloth clinging to a branch. He felt his own unique little demonic sting; a small, desolate voice at the back of his mind what screamed at him to push away, to repel the feelings of goodness, of warmth, of affection. He pushed it aside, far the more practiced at avoiding this biological bullshit than Aziraphale and instead gave himself over entirely to the sensation of being warm and safe and comfortable. He went one further in fact, reaching up to place his lips to the curve of the angel's cheek.

"Thanks."

Aziraphale smiled, turning his head so as to grace the demon's forehead with his own kiss. "You're welcome." He murmured and they were, for a few moments then, simply silent and content in the presence of one another. Aziraphale found a means of balancing his book against the crook of the leg which wasn't entrapped by Crowley's, using his now free arm to wrap about the demon's shoulders. Aziraphale thought him to have nodded off some time ago and so was a little surprised when Crowley in fact spoke.

"Thanks as well, for uh... you know. Doing what you did today." The demon's fingers tweezed a ridge in the fabric of Aziraphale's pyjama top. Giving a distracted, idle twist which served as something of a distraction from his embarrassment. "It took a lot of guts, taking that step. ... I'm glad you did."

"I'm glad I did too." Aziraphale said, and meant it. He cast his mind back to that moment in the carpark earlier that morning; how he had reassured himself with the thought that by that very night, all the unpleasantness what had transpired would be done with. What a wonderful understatement.

"I'm... gonna... miss old Gretch, you know?" Aziraphale looked down, only able to see the half of Crowley's face which wasn't buried in his chest. The eye what was visible stared out over the rise of his stomach vacantly; disinterested in the distracted movements of his fingers as they pinched and plucked at Aziraphale's clothing. "It's weird... I'm happier than I can remember being in a long time but I'm sad as well, because... because I lost someone I started thinking of as a... sort of friend."

Aziraphale set his book down on the bedside table. "I'm ever so sorry." He said, brushing his hand up through the crown of Crowley's hair and pulling him close enough to cup his chin and place a kiss to his forehead. It was a new method to comforting someone and he wasn't altogether certain if it was working but it was instinctively what he wanted to do. Crowley leaned into the touch, the energy of his body suggesting that he was very much in need of the comfort.

"Selfish bitch." He chuckled, a sad undertone to his usual stroke of natural dark humour. "She picked a hell of a time to croak. Probably did it on purpose, ya know? Just to stick it to me."

Aziraphale pressed another kiss to the ridge of Crowley's brow, passing a thumb over the subtle indentation of his cheek.

"Do try and get some sleep, my dear." He murmured, easing the demon's limp, unresisting body back against his side. "I'm here."

Crowley, eyes already feathering and brain foundering beneath the near toxic quantities of alcohol heaped in upon it, settled his temple to where he could hear, off in the distant channels of Aziraphale's body, the steady thump of the angel's heart. The organ which was not required to beat but was still doing the work to which it was assigned nonetheless. It was both soothing and reassuring. Like a metronome. The soft ticking of a clock.

"Yeah... I'm uh... I'm tired." He confessed, letting his eyelids drop shut. Crowley had slept incredibly poorly over those past few months, so it did not take long for sleep to stake its claim. He was away to snoring within seconds, with that ever so delightfully congested sound what Aziraphale equated to a steel pipe going through a Buzzsaw to the accompaniment of a cat with a bellyache screeching a feline rendition of _Casta Diva._

It was a truly dreadful din, but a din for which the angel was grateful, enamoured and relieved at the prospect of being kept awake by. He watched over the demon's snorting, hocking form a few minutes longer, before picking up his book and returning to it with a smile so serene you might have thought him to have been reading to the idyllic sounds of the Valdivian rainforest.

And though the hours of the night were long, the angel kept the demon sheltered beneath the canopy of his arm, much as he had done with the bow of his wing, all those many years ago.

* * *

**~X~**

  
_**~The Archangel** _ _ **Gabriel's office~** _

_**Heaven...** _

Something was on Gabriel's mind. Something for the once, not related to his recent troubling considerations where the Vices and Virtues were concerned.

He had been muddling over the exchange between Aziraphale and Crowley since the day before. It had all been troubling and rather the more food for thought. But something about it kept snagging at a corner of his mind; like a toenail improperly clipped and lending itself to whatever fabric might otherwise be draped upon it.

It took him some time, in fact, to clue onto what it was he was that appeared particularly out of sorts.

_Sunshine._

_"Go back to Heaven, sunshine."_

The demon Crowley had made such particular emphasis on the word 'sunshine'. It made no sense why he would.

Gabriel might have shrugged it off, if not for one other thing.

_"Don't talk to me about the greater good, sunshine. I'm the archangel fucking Gabriel."_

Of course, Aziraphale might very well have told Crowley, word for word what Gabriel had said.

What didn't make sense, so far as Gabriel was concerned was that Aziraphale, in spite of his myriad of faults, was hardly a self-pitying sort.

He could hardly envision him running back down to earth and espousing to his demonic acquaintance every intricate detail of his exchange between himself and his Heavenly superiors. It simply wasn't in his nature.

Gabriel set down his pen, glancing a finger over the bridge of his nose.

Something else.

They had been... _holding hands_ , hadn't they?

The archangel felt an all too human chill run the circumference of his spine. Things, it seemed, were very much afoot.

And here he was, for the first time in his long existence, starting off on the back one.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks for reading along with me, lovelies! I'm off now to enjoy my birthday; my modest of hopes being that I might sequester a helping of oysters for myself. Fingers crossed!
> 
> As usual, I hope that you guys are enjoying and I look forward to seeing you along for the next update! Until then, and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxxooo


	28. Or, in which an angel and a demon take a dip.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale would be lying if he said that Crowley's own desire was not extraordinarily seductive in its own right. To make no mention of the... pleading.
> 
> Why this made him feel so powerful, he would not say. For he knew quite rightly that it was the base thought of Crowley, plaintively beseeching him that was the systemically arousing one. Soft, epicurean entreaties hushed into the waiting grip of the air, pleasures poised in insufferable suspension, fingers kneading, bodies rising and falling upon tender waves of ecstasy.
> 
> And there, quivering beneath its bows of barely bridled lust, the whispered hush of his name. Powerless, able only to subject himself to the ply of Aziraphale's hands and body and lips. Aching for release, begging, pleading...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As per the norm, welcome back everyone! So much thanks to all of you who are reading along, sticking with the story, providing kudos and encouragement! And of course, big thanks to those of you who take that extra special time out of your way to comment, chat and feedback! It really does help to light a fire under my butt, and gives a much needed boost of dopamine and feel-good happiness! Always ever so much appreciated :)  
> Have to admit, I'm feeling a little burned out at the moment, and might need to take a bit of a break once I've finished the updating process and posted the first part of the brand new chapter. Nothing to worry about; just a bit worn out and brain numb. Mainly from some RL stuff and just... well! (Gestures to fic) I have written a lot. I love it, but, I may need some time to just flip my brain over like an old mattress and air it out a bit.  
> In the meantime, I have this small update to send your way! Sorry, I would like to have done more in the one night, but I am heavily editing as I go along and given the busy time of year, I can only do so much whilst still being a wife and fur baby mother. I'll keep trying to get chapters out as quick as I can!  
> As usual, thanks everyone for your patience, and to those readers who are spring chickens to the work; hope that you enjoy!

**~X~**

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_**Thursday - 11th of April, 9:45pm** _

_**Crowley's Flat - Mayfair, London** _   
_**Nine months to the Apex... ** _

"Angel?"

"Yes, my dear?"

"Do you think it's strange that we haven't slept together, but we can still share a bath?"

Aziraphale took a moment to consider this. It was a Thursday night; three days post the passing of Crowley's most cherished client Gretchen. Aziraphale and Crowley were currently installed in the warm, bubble festooned waters of the demon's opulent bath. A bath of which any hapless visitor to the flat might well have doffed a concerted eyebrow at; given that it could be more accurately described as a small pool, and really rather disproportionate so far as its being situated in the ensuite of the main bedroom.

Crowley had gotten the idea from having viewed Japanese _'onsen's'_ at some point during his long life. Being in possession of reptilian like biorhythms, it was only natural that he abhorred the cold and as such, both appropriately and bitterly resented the need to drag himself off to any number of large, freezing bodies of water in the past (most usually in the equally inhospitable dead of the night) so as to give his wings a proper scrub.

The _onsen_ had been a game changer, so far as he had been concerned and once having set up shop in his new flat in the seventies, he had gone to great trouble and expense to both expand the ensuite (taking out what had been a third bedroom in the process) and installing a very traditional looking European equivalent of an _onsen_ -replication. (It was no joke so far as the expense was concerned either. He had also been required to purchase the flat located directly below his, just so as to have the floor located beneath the ensuite reinforced and built down. Having a secondary abode did have its perks, however. It proved useful for storing his millennia's worth of accumulated 'souvenirs', of which he would regularly rotate with those on display within in his own flat. He never did like to look at the same things for too long. So far as decorative features went).

The _onsen_ was deep, naturally. Crowley himself was a little over six feet tall, and when properly filled the water lapped at a level just shy of his collarbone. It might have cost a fortune to fill under normal circumstances, but Crowley, as you might surmise, was far from your normal person. He was a demon, and, with but a snap of his fingers, he could have the taps running at thrice the regular speed they might otherwise have done and with the water company never the wiser for it. After all, it wasn't as though the water was supplied by them. There was no incoming piping attached to the _onsen_.

It was surmounted by lovely cedar wood decking, with ample space for perching drinks and elbows alike. There were glasses set upon it now, in fact; and a platter of assorted nibblies what looked as though they had been prepared in anticipation of a Kindergartener's birthday party. (Sans the peanut M&M's, but that was simply as a result of Aziraphale having long since devoured them).

Crowley was currently perched on one of the submerged benches, fingers plying their trade through the damp feathers of Aziraphale's wings. This was the precise reason, of course, as to why the _onsen_ was required to be so wide and so deep in the first place. Washing one's wings was never a chore void of effort and Crowley much preferred to be able to undertake said chore in a warm and hospitable environment. There was all sorts of unpleasantness what might be found in rivers and waterways and bayou's and the like. To say _nothing_ of how amorous the act of fluffing out ones plumage seemed to make any ducks what might have been observing from the nearby bulrushes.

Aziraphale, reaching back under the feathers of his left wing, found the stem of his wine glass and brought the receptacle to his lips, giving the contents a thoughtful and more the appreciative sipping from.

"If you recall, we _have_ in fact slept together on more than the one occasion, Crowley."

"You _know_ what I mean." The demon remarked, eyes furrowed somewhat petulantly as he failed yet still at finding at least one wayward feather of which to pluck. Aziraphale, it seemed, had been uncharacteristically responsible with tending to his wing hygiene in the time they had spent apart. "Not _sleeping_ , sleeping. Love making. Beast with two backs, all that." And, because Aziraphale cast him a curt look over his shoulder, added in his defence: "What, I can't even say beast with two backs? Thought you would have loved that. One of the better ones Shakespeare filched off of me."

"And I believe that _you_ had in turn 'filched' it off of Francois Rabelais. _La bête à deux dos_." Aziraphale recited, waiting a moment to see whether Crowley might in fact correct him on his pronunciation and pleased to discover that no such admonition's came. "Actually, I think my favourite might very well be 'journey's end in lovers meeting'." He cast yet another more tentative glance across the rise of his shoulder, to happen upon the contrarily softening expression of the demon's face in return. "Were you inferring anything by that, perchance?"

"You know me, angel..." Crowley said, lifting some of Aziraphale's damp feathers out of the way; clearing space in which to then impart his lips to the back of one water dappled shoulder. "- always ever the optimist."

He placed yet another soft, and lingering kiss to the centre of Aziraphale's back. Another then, paying tribute to the indenture what dwelt as the heart between the angel's wings. He seemed set on continuing further still and the thought of where such a thing might wind up, was enough to send Aziraphale to squirming in the warm water.

"We uh... we shouldn't." He murmured, giving a small, deterring flutter of his wings.

The demon sighed, pressing his forehead briefly to the back of Aziraphale's neck, before easing away.

" _Why_ shouldn't we?"

"Because..." It should not have been such a struggle to get his point across. But Crowley made it difficult by wanting everything, as he had always done, spelt out in its entirety. "Well... you know."

It was not so much that Crowley was a demon which made him want to shake the metaphorical tree just to see how much discomfort he could jostle from the branches. It was just some particular aspect of his personality; the drive to challenge others, so that they in turn might challenge their own inert prejudices.

He was the sort who liked to unpack things; examine each item as it came to light, work out every curve, corner and detail, before moving onto the next. Leaving things out of sight and out of mind had never at all been his cup of tea. There was a lot of cowardice, he found in that. Playing pretend rather than simply Living Reality.

"I really don't." Is what he said, though they both knew well and good that he very much _did_ understand where Aziraphale was coming from. This was hardly in the spirit of letting the angel off easy, however. " _What_ do you suppose it to be, that I supposedly _know_?"

Aziraphale had seen starving dogs what would relinquish their grip on a bone with more willingness than Crowley would forego a point. And because he understood all too well this stubborn aspect of the demon's personality, he made the perhaps very wise decision to no longer skirt the borders of the topic but to wade right on in. (An appropriate enough metaphor, all things considered).

"All right." He said, turning in the water and taking a few steps back so that he could look Crowley directly in the eye. "Let's just go ahead and discuss the elephant in the room right now, shall we?"

"What elephant?" Crowley said, making rather the show of glancing about the room in astonishment for some sign of the aforementioned 'elephant'. Aziraphale chose to ignore this decidedly unsubtle and pointless delineation and soldiered on.

"Clearly, you have invited me here with some... _agenda_ in mind."

Crowley was going to even greater strains to effect surprise at Aziraphale's statement. He was far too expressive to pull it off, however and kept undermining the effort by smiling in an appropriately sneaky manner.

"Oh, really. And just what sort of agenda might that be?"

Aziraphale gave him the sort of long, withering look that a teenager might similarly direct towards a parent who is attempting to bond with their child over grossly inaccurate Internet terminology.

"You are far too clever to pretend to be this ignorant." Aziraphale gestured about the interior of the _onsen_ , almost upsetting his half full glass in the process. "Here I thought it would just be me, _by myself_ , giving my wings a much needed wash following dinner. The next thing I know, the bathroom is decked out in candlelight, you've got 'romantic' music playing and there are rose petals and bubble bath festooning the water! And _you_ entering said water, by inelegant way of a bomb, might I add!"

As Aziraphale had stated, and what has so far been failed at drawing your attention to, was that the ensuite had indeed been transformed into Crowley's very own over hammy interpretation of a 'classical romantic' setting. Subtle would be far from the appropriate term to be employed; much as sledgehammer is a demonstrative over exaggeration whence employed in the describing of a rubber mallet.

The only light currently lending dimension to the edges of the room, were those of the scented candles (all red, Aziraphale had earlier observed). Crowley had liberally pistoned rose petals and bubble bath into the water, which Aziraphale always questioned the necessity for and was shortly thereafter grateful for the presence of, as the demon had apparently decided that the angel would be far too lonely being on his own in the tub and had gone right on ahead and invited himself in.

He hadn't bothered with the apparently frivolous courtesy of leaving his underwear on and was currently lounging about the bath with not a stitch to his chosen name, making Aziraphale (who was of course, as he always was, modestly wreathed in his boxer briefs) rather relieved that Crowley had in fact gone to the effort of tipping in an approximate metric tonne of coconut scented bubble bath. It provided something in the means of a prudery fog bank, whilst serving the dualistic purpose of assaulting the nostril hairs with the sort of percussive force that made any functioning creature want to claw their olfactory receptors to shreds.

Not thirty seconds after Aziraphale was left, soaked and flustered from the indignity of a naked demon performing a bomb into the very bath he had expected to enjoy sole custody of, then Crowley had snapped his fingers, eliciting some rather euphonious saxophone music to lilt from his phone like a sinuous hand broaching a would be lovers inside thigh in the back seat of a drive in movie. If not for the added incentive of the wine, the nibblie platter and, if an angel was to be honest with himself, the fact that Crowley was especially easy on the eye (especially in the soft glow of the otherwise overpoweringly berry scented candles) than Aziraphale might have gone ahead and clambered right on out of the bath and left him to it.

But the angel was, much as he had nearly always been, a creature accustomed to the finer comforts and once the shock of being liberally soaked by bubbles and rose petals had worn off, he found that he was not in fact predisposed to the sharing of a bath. Though he did fancy that it was much cooler than Crowley might otherwise prefer. This was a demon, after all, what would be most comfortable showering in water just ever so slightly situated below boiling point. Which of course was only slightly cooler than the temperature preferred by the majority of human females.

Crowley himself was under no such delusions that he had been in any way subtle. Subtlety had gone right on out the window when he had wrapped his arms around his hairy little shins and dropped himself dead centre of the bath and knocked his tailbone into about several thousand pieces on the baseboard in return for the venture.

But he was a demon what didn't much care for the pains what were required in exercising subtlety these days. Times were changing. Circumstances were shifting. He was starting to lose count of how many times he and Aziraphale had shared a kiss these past few of days. (He had been keeping track there a while and felt rather giddy when the numbers had finally, blissfully, entered the double digits).

But just because he was being obvious regards his intentions, it was hardly cause to rescind on his eternal vow to have some fun, where fun was to be found.

"Well, I profess myself insulted that you would see fit to question my patrician intentions, angel." He said, taking up his own glass and giving a haughty sniff of the naturally expensive bouquet before partaking. "Here you were, telling me all throughout dinner what a truly gruelling day you had at work; what with the dreaded One Customer Who Browsed for Hours and Wouldn't Leave but Who Looked at Any Moment as Though he Might in Fact make a Purchase. And I, as a caring, munificent life partner thought to myself, 'What might I possibly do, to make this very sad angel's day better'? And then," And here, he snapped his fingers so as to truly sell the point. "It came to me: Aromatherapy."

He arched his dripping hand through the air, as though drawing out the path of an invisible rainbow and Aziraphale in turn did his utmost not to give in and smile in response to the demons' typically ludicrous spiel.

"The rose petals, the candles and the bubble bath add a relaxing aromatic touch to what might otherwise have been described as a more pedestrian bathing experience. And this isn't romantic music; it's _palliative_ music. Trust me, I work in the human service industry now; I _know_ these things."

"How in the Hell do you suppose _saxophone's_ to be in any way palliative?"

"It's _woodwind_. What other place in all the world is more relaxing than the _woods_?" Crowley persisted, to which Aziraphale was finding it ever the more difficult not to give himself over to chortling. "And the _wind_? A soft breeze through the lush, fully loomed leaves of the woods; brushing up against your cheeks, caressing your hair?"

"They're a _brass_ instrument!" Aziraphale further emphasized, failing now by permitting an amused smile to alight itself to the corners of his lips. " _Brass_ being the appropriate word! And this is clearly not the sort of music one envisions as being particularly relaxing! It sounds like the music they play in the background of the wine bar we frequent!" He paused, cocking his head to the side a moment and paying closer attention now to the music. "You know... I rather think that it _is_ the music that they play in the wine bar. Did you ask the staff for the name of the band?"

"I resent the implication." Crowley said, sinking down onto the lower step so that the water now rose as high as his chest. He was getting a little chilly having so much of his upper body exposed. "It's actually a YouTube video called _Best Romantic Saxophone to inspire creativity in Love making._ The suspicions you have." And, after a pause in which Aziraphale was required to eject some wine what had unceremoniously negotiated its path down his windpipe, added: "And the candles are just a necessary evil. Powers out in the whole building. What, you really just expect us to go sitting about in the dark? How creepy and strange would that be? Having a bath together in the _dark_?"

"There was no reason for you to be in the bath in the first place." Aziraphale reminded him, setting down his wine glass and extending his wings up above his head a moment. He gave each a little shake, to work some of the water from the surface of his feathers. "And don't go and try that on with the power being out in the whole building. The lights were on in your living room when we passed through!"

"... Oh." Crowley said, pupils shifting into the corners of his eye sockets at the mention of this particular oversight. "Knew I'd forgotten to do something earlier."

"Yes. Patch the holes in your otherwise foolproof cover story." Aziraphale said, smiling as he happened across one of the submerged seats in the _onsen_. He had been standing a while in the deepest trench of the bath; the better for Crowley to be able to attend to his wings but it had proven wearing on his legs. He eased back onto the seat, not so far as to crush his wings into the baths border but enough so as to ease the aches out of his muscles.

Crowley, having apparently grown tired of the half-hearted game they were playing, raised both hands in an unmistakeable sign of surrender.

"Okay, so sue me; I wanted to do something romantic." He snapped his fingers to bring the bottle of red wine whipping over into his palm and used it then to top up his drink. "It doesn't mean I was angling for sex."

"Were you hoping that it might lead to sex?" Aziraphale asked, extending his own glass so that Crowley could freshen it. The demon gave an unapologetic, differential looking shrug as he topped up the angel's beverage, placing the bottle back then atop the wooden border of the bath.

"Of course I'm hoping. I'm _always_ hoping. Doesn't mean I'm going to be pushy about it. Kinda just wanted to have a bath together, really." He took a deep sip from his wine, holding up his index finger as an appeal for the angel to wait before speaking and then put the glass aside. He had a very serious expression on his face, all of a sudden. "Look. Let's just go ahead now and take sex right off of the table. It's gone. No chance of any beasts of any number of backs tonight." He gave Aziraphale a now softly, earnest look; which was always so much more the disarming when he didn't have his glasses on. His eyes were so wide and tender, in spite of their supposed demonic nature. "If you're not worrying about that, can you just enjoy us being here together? Sharing in the novelty of a new experience?"

Aziraphale considered this terrible preposition a moment; watching as a small yellow duck emerged from an ostentatious hillock of bubbles and floated on its side towards him. Another of Crowley's cheeky, thinly veiled little references, more the likely.

What a dreadful ask, he thought. To decadently lounge in a luxurious bath, wine in hand, finger food within easy reach and a more than agreeable bathing companion with which to pass the time.

An agreeable bathing companion who most anyone would consider to be extraordinarily comely on even his worst day. Whose very edges sang of an unfettered sensuality; whose face was a perfect juxtaposition of exquisite handsomeness and ambrosial vulnerability. Whose body was very much wet and very much naked and what Aziraphale was doing his utmost to avoid thinking of and or gazing at too long.

There had been kisses, these past few days. They had been wonderful, if rather brief. Not so far as there had been a lacking of desire, but as a direct result of Aziraphale's celestial failsafe's. The pain, he was aggrieved to find, seemed only to be alleviated some by his imbibing of alcohol. And of course, this was hardly a suitable long term plan. He could not be expected to be under the influence all the time. And it was something that he did in fact, place a great deal of importance on. He did not wish to be intoxicated most anytime he and Crowley were to share something of an intimate act together. If it were an oft times occasional thing, this of course he could readily abide. But not all the time.

Much like anyone, he would have very much liked to have rolled over first thing in the morning and pressed a kiss to his beloved's forehead without getting a spattering of nasty pinpricks throughout his celestial spirit. To put his arms about his midsection as he slumped, sleepily by the kitchen isle; waiting for the kettle to boil. To watch him move across the room, admire the pleasing proportions of his physical body and transmute those thoughts further into something otherwise more imaginatively indulgent. Yes, even the tepid fantasies what might otherwise be nursed by the urbane mind of the Principality Aziraphale were considered 'off bounds', so far as his biological rubric was concerned.

He had hoped it would get easier. But the pain persisted. Even Crowley's earlier kisses to his back had been just as grievous as they had been pleasing. Not in and of the act itself, but for how the spirit chose to punish Aziraphale's physical body for responding.

It repelled violently whereupon it sensed arousal. Which made life extraordinarily difficult, for Aziraphale. For with this newly brokered closeness between them, the angel found himself desiring Crowley more and more by the moment. It hung suspended beneath his skin; demonstrably quivering, desperate for release. Like a bullet awaiting the squeeze of the finger what might then release it from the chamber into which it had been sequestered. A bow string pulled taut and readied; an arrow poised and ready to fly. Aziraphale felt it all, suspended there inside of him and felt further still the agonizing stings, jabs and lately _stabs_ of the side of him what was still wholly angelic, what was still betrothed to Heaven, that seized him whenever he sought to ease free some of that repressed desire.

It did not help being made to sit there, staring at someone as physically beguiling as Crowley, bathed in candlelight, wearing nothing but water and being serenaded to the tune of 'The book of love' as played by a very sultry sounding saxophone, which you just know had little to no difficulty getting a phone number from any of the other woodwind instruments in the band.

"Well... yes, of course I can. I don't mind sharing a bath with you, per say. The rest of it..." Aziraphale chuckled nervously, truly hoping he would be able to get his point across without potentially offending or upsetting Crowley by it. "I just... I feel as though I can't quite relax, if there's some expectation of things perhaps going... further. The... pain. You know."

"Put it out of mind then. None of that tonight." Crowley said, demonstrating once more to Aziraphale just how kind and patient the demon was capable of being. Which should hardly have surprised him, really. "That being said..."

He slipped down into the deeper reaches of the bath, wading the short distance to where Aziraphale was perched. Gave him that soft, deeply enquiring look, of which the angel was still only becoming accustomed.

"If I were to... let's just say... slip a kiss in here and there...? ...Would it be so awful?"

Aziraphale smiled, reaching up to so as to place his palms to each plain of the demon's lovely face. Branching his thumbs across each subtle indent of his temples. "I should think this would be something I could reasonably accommodate."

Crowley's eyes darted from his own and dropped so as to hold court on his lips. He waited then for Aziraphale to rescind the space between them; something the angel had taken note of lately whenever they had shared a kiss. Perhaps it was insecurity, Aziraphale thought, alighting his tongue ever so fleetingly to the upper ridge of Crowley's teeth and feeling then the demon's stir to life as though it were a creature summoned from the darkest recesses of its cave. With the exception of that first kiss in the Bentley those near two weeks past, it seemed as though Crowley was one who much preferred for Aziraphale to set the pace. Once triggered however, his hunger was palpable. He drew a lot in from their kiss, much in the way that he demanded the utmost in exchange for his gaze.

The kisses were ever so nice, Aziraphale thought. So long as they didn't go on too long. The longer time spent on the toil between their lips, the more his arousal naturally heightened and that's when the pain became sharp. Rather like a migraine, he found. If a migraine hit you fair in one solid swing and took to kicking you in every inch of your celestial spirit with steel capped boots and a penchant for sadism what might have raised brows among the more judicious torturers of the Spanish Inquisition.

The wine he had drunk had helped on this particular occasion. He made good and certain to keep his hands up about Crowley's face and neck, however. Though this did not always work. Crowley's features were angular and his cheekbones in particular made Aziraphale think of any number of things what might have possessed a similar sensual consonant. His shoulder blades, the brace of his clavicle, his - (may he be forgiven) - his... hip bones.

Aziraphale had never seen them. He had never gazed at Crowley's naked body from the front yet long enough to have some idea as to what his hipbones might have looked like. He thought about them, however. Quite a bit more than his celestial failsafe's might otherwise have preferred.

He thought about brushing his thumbs across them; feeling the bone peak through the smooth layer of skin. They would be more prominent, of course, if he was lying down. They would be sumptuous from an angle such as this. He would take to them then with his lips; sup and retrace the path what his thumbs had travelled with his tongue. Ply his hands about to cup to the globes of his nectareous little bottom; as sumptuous as the base of a ripe pear.

Aziraphale drew back from the kiss, feeling the sharp painful cinch of the celestial failsafe's reefing themselves about his spirit. He did his very best to make the movement look natural, not at all wanting Crowley to think that he was flinching away from him. It must have worked, because the demon did not appear to be put off or indeed dismayed. He gave instead a simple, winsome sounding sigh, pressing his forehead to Aziraphale's temple. His hair, flattened out by the weight of the water, hung in wilted strands across his forehead. He looked awfully endearing, the angel thought, which was an observation the angelic constraints appeared to take no exception with. Those thoughts that were fond, what were rooted primarily in love, were all well and fine, it would seem. Requiring nothing in the way of chastisement.

"One day I'll let you have your wicked way, angel." Crowley murmured. Aziraphale felt particularly aware of his being naked and separated from his own body by a few scant inches of water. "Watch and see."

" _My_ wicked way?" The angel said, with an ironic scoff. "This coming from the demon with currently not but a stitch to his name?"

"We could easily remedy that." Crowley's hands dropped suddenly from where they had been cupped to either side of Aziraphale's neck. They lit upon the legs of his boxer briefs and pinched an edge of material in what was more the likely an intent to tease. Aziraphale easily deterred him with a gentle push to the chest which sent the cheeky faced demon swishing back through the choppy curls of water.

"Don't you bother! I'm quite comfortable bathing as is, thank you. Now..." He himself rotated about in the water like a chicken on a rotisserie spit, keeping his wings elevated until he once more had his back to Crowley. He lowered them back into the waiting grip of the water, gesturing over his shoulder. "If you are genuinely interested in pleasing me, be so kind as to continue with what you were doing."

Crowley was rather the well versed with manipulation. One might say it was a demon's bread and butter. As such, he was familiar with the form that it took and knew all too well what Aziraphale was doing. The knowing however, was little deterrent in in preventing him from folding like cheap crepe paper.

"Kindness isn't really in my repertoire, angel. But for you, I s'pose I can make an exception." Crowley eased himself back atop the submerged seat and set his fingers once more to the angel's surprisingly white plume of feathers. He was as proud as he was annoyed by Aziraphale's sudden attention to detail; for it meant that his words had (after so many the thousands of years) been heeded, but it also provided him with little in the way of self-indulgent entertainment. "Haven't left me much to do, really." He said glumly, turning his attentions to Aziraphale's back and latching on to what he hoped was a blackhead but what turned out to be a freckle. He received a bunt to the face from Aziraphale's wing, who hadn't much enjoyed the sensation of being needlessly pinched.

"There, you see? I _have_ learned." Said the angel, not so humble as to filter the smug tone out of his voice. In the two months that he and Crowley had spent apart, Aziraphale had found himself doing any number of little things of which, in some far off corner of his mind, might have pleased the demon enough to draw him back in. Taking decent care of his wings had been difficult, as it was a task he had always left to the technicians of Heaven and Crowley himself when the service had no longer been available. Washing ones wings in the cushy shower bay of his bookshop had been something of an exercise in absurdist comedy, but he had managed all the same. Had plucked, groomed, moisturized, soaped and scrubbed, all in the unconscious (though sometimes readily acknowledged) hope, that it would serve as evidence to Crowley that he was, in fact, an angel entirely capable of change.

"Didn't really give you much choice, I suppose." Crowley said, a sadness harmonizing alongside his words. He rubbed moisturizer soap between his hands, working up a good lather before then applying this to the marginal covets. "Sorry again. About... all that."

Aziraphale, back arching slightly from the sensual pressure of Crowley's attentive palms, could hardly bring himself to now care of the disparate days past. "It's all right, dear. I'm sorry for being such a thoughtless prat about it all."

Because 'All', of course, encompassed much greater scopes of time and moments than a mere simple two months. In that regard, Aziraphale knew he owed Crowley a great deal more apology than what the demon owed him.

"Let's maybe just agree to stop apologizing to each other every five minutes, eh?" Crowley chuckled, working his hands now up over the bones what formed the bridge of Aziraphale's wings. The feathery down formed itself into thickened, bristly chunks, what shifted beneath his palms. He was impressed to find little in the way of accumulated grime being expunged into the gathering of soap. Aziraphale _had_ been learning.

"Quite right." Aziraphale sighed, tilting his head back and then lightly from one side to the next. Loosing small satisfying cracks from within the joints. "Ah..."

"Feels good?"

"Rather does." The angel gave another sigh; one more to the side of frustrated. "I do wish I could enjoy most of these things without these damned celestial spines jabbing into me every time I feel an ounce of physical pleasure."

"Did it ever happen in the past?" Crowley asked, passing his hands down along the indent of Aziraphale's spine. Massaging now his back and his shoulders. Well, there was so little work so far as his wings were concerned. "When you first started eating and drinking?"

"Not really. Sort of like a pin being pricked into the tip of my finger. This feels by comparison as though my palm is being..." Aziraphale held up his hands and made a gesture to one with the other; as though scraping something against it. "Run across a vegetable grater. My... metaphorical hand, that is."

Crowley winched at the hypothetical. "Bless... no wonder you find it so difficult to just give into it." He took Aziraphale's refilled glass down off of the baths border and dangled it over his head, like a fermented branch of mistletoe. "Have another drink. Seems to help."

"Yes, it does." The angel acknowledged, accepting the glass and taking another low, steady sip from the contents. It did help and he did rather _want_ it to help. Especially now. Crowley's hands felt wonderful against his sore human muscles. A particular _sort_ of wonderful.

It wasn't as though this was the first time Aziraphale had received a massage. He was a purveyor of most things pleasurable and had indulged in this particular activity the more than once in his six thousand years. But it was the first time _Crowley_ had put his hands to him as such. It felt marvellous and more the pleasurable than any of those that the supposed professionals had provided. He did not want for it to stop.

"And... I don't want you thinking that it's not that I don't enjoy what we share. I would rather like to share... more in fact." Aziraphale reached one hand back through the water until it brushed against the column of Crowley's shin. He gave him a tender squeeze, sending a distant flickering of Heavenly disapproval to lash against shuttered mental windows in his mind. "I don't know... I just keep on hoping that it will dim if I keep pushing back long enough. Exposure therapy, if you will."

"You could always just stay drunk?" Said Crowley, more than a little disappointed to feel Aziraphale's hand drift away. He didn't get the barbs. For him, the pleasure was exclusive. He ached to expand upon it.

"I don't _want_ to be drunk all the time, Crowley! I want to be able to touch you and hold you and to be with you no matter what condition I am in. Just as any one person can rightfully expect to be able to do with the person that they love." In spite of his words, Aziraphale took another belt from his drink. He might not wish to be intoxicated all the time, but there was no rule stating that this was the case tonight. "One shouldn't be forced to... have to feel all of this _dreadful_ pain all the time."

Crowley's hands ceased their movements against Aziraphale's back. Trailed up instead to slide to either side of his neck. He could feel the angel's pulse beneath his fingers, the blood what squared about his body shifting, resonating, restoring. He stared at the back of the angel's head; at the soft, white curls of hair. Wanting to place a kiss in amongst the tangled flock. Wanting to reach in, grab the part of the angel's brain or spirit or whatever the Heaven it was that was hurting him, _holding_ him _back_ and _rip it the fuck out_.

"If it... if it's all too difficult..." The demon murmured and Aziraphale felt then a different stroke of pain. Pain for the fear and the sadness present in Crowley's tone. The demon was ever so afraid of losing this new form which their relationship had taken. This dynamic what had drawn them closer, physically, emotionally and spiritually. Having tasted what this future might look for the two of them, he found himself intoxicated by the premise of 'What might be'. And the thought that it might still be wrenched from his grasp, was unbearable to him.

But what was even more unbearable was that Aziraphale was in pain. Where Crowley felt only pleasure, Aziraphale's was balanced out in equal measures by discomfort. And Crowley may very well have been a demon, but he could never be accused of being a selfish creature. Especially not where Aziraphale was concerned.

He didn't want to give up the chance of there being a physical love between them. But he would, albeit bitterly, if the pain was simply too much for Aziraphale to abide.

And just when the angel was certain he would not have loved him the more for the everything that he was.

"Don't go on with feeling guilty now; I won't have a bar of it." Aziraphale said sharply, turning in the water and guiding his wings about so that they formed a cacoon around both himself and Crowley. "You have not coerced me into this, Crowley. I want quite as much as you want."

_More, in fact_ , he thought to himself, gazing into the bright of the demon's eyes, the familial petulant looking jut of that lower lip. He took it briefly between his own, the slightest sup what Crowley attempted to lean into but was teasingly evaded. Aziraphale placed his lips instead to the side of the demon's neck; projected yet a deeper kiss into the column of tanned flesh; reaching over to slide his wine glass, the base clinking and clanging against the wood panelling all the while, onto the side of the bath.

He moved their bodies in closer to one another's, Crowley's soft murmurs of satisfaction more the sensual soliloquy than anything what might have drifted from the speaker of his phone. Aziraphale dipped his hands down through the water, separating clouds of bubbles and rose petals; some of which had adhered themselves to their skin. He felt Crowley's palms and fingers press across the plain of his back, one of his feet sliding about to wrap around his ankle. It was little different to when they were sleeping, Aziraphale found, who had grown accustomed to having Crowley wrap himself about him with greater tenacity than perhaps even his own pyjama's had accomplished.

Aziraphale slid his hands in around Crowley's slender waist, pushing down further still towards his hips. The sweet arch of those bones, he knew, resided just offside of the demon's groin. He grazed them with his thumbs, felt Crowley squirm and whimper softly against his ear.

And the... that benighted spiritual reproach what came in like a maul. It struck hard enough to resonate through his skull this time; right between the eyes.

"Ah... you see?! Even _that_!" He exclaimed furiously, sliding away from Crowley and bringing his wine glass along for the ride. He took a sip, grumbling to himself as he tucked his wings back into their intangible covets and rubbed his fingers into his aching temple. "Oh, I have such... fervent desires. You can't begin to understand just how much I truly wish to hold you; to run my hands over every inch of your body. To partake of your kiss until our lips are sore and spent. Breathe your deepest breath into the farthest reaches of me." He gnawed into the corner of his lip, hard enough to make it feel raw. "It's infuriating!"

Crowley, still rather breathless and draped upon the seat of the bath like a tie what is gradually slipping loose from its coat hanger, leaned forwards now, lips parted and eyes similarly hooded.

"What else?"

Aziraphale looked at him in confusion. "What do you mean, _what else_?"

Crowley shrugged one of his wet shoulders. "Well... not like we can actually _do_ any of this, right now. Not with your brain acting up the way that it is. Next best thing, isn't it?" He gave the angel what he certainly hoped to be an appealing look. "Talking about it. Telling me what it is you _want_ to do."

"I was just sort of... speaking out loud..." Said the angel, quite as suspicious of Crowley's entreaty as he was his very words themselves. _Why_ had he spoken such things out loud? He was frustrated, yes but to have gone right on ahead and put words to the fantasies he had been entertaining... "I hadn't meant to go and get all... salacious with it."

_Had he though? He was ever so good at finding loopholes, after all._

_Was this simply what that was? Finding a loophole?_

_Seduction through that which he was ever so intimately equated? Words? Words what were powerful and demonstrative. What could be seductive and passionate and deeply erotic._

" _You're_ the one big on the literature, the linguistics." Crowley was saying, a direct indictment in fact of what Aziraphale had been considering. He gave the angel a long, almost pleading look. Eyes no longer narrowed but about as wide as he could likely make them. He knew quite well that Aziraphale had terrible difficulties with resisting this gaze; for it was sweet and well meaning and somehow undeniably desirable. That resonance of vulnerability. "Come on... can't leave me on a cliff-hanger now. What happens after that... deepest breath stuff?"

Aziraphale glanced at him side on, still not entirely certain as to whether he ought be playing into this. It seemed a dangerous indulgence, somehow. And a little... embarrassing, at that. "I should think... that such an exercise might be better suited to... more appropriate times."

Crowley groaned, tipping his head back against the frame of the bath and reaching over his capsized form so as to reef up his wine glass. "Oh, come on! Just give me _something_ , angel! Just one last little addition, at least."

Aziraphale would be lying if he said that Crowley's own desire was not extraordinarily seductive in its own right. To make no mention of the... pleading.

Why this made him feel so powerful, he would not say. For he knew quite rightly that it was the base thought of Crowley, plaintively beseeching him that was the systemically arousing one. Soft, epicurean entreaties hushed into the waiting grip of the air, pleasures poised in insufferable suspension, fingers kneading, bodies rising and falling upon tender waves of ecstasy.

And there, quivering beneath its bows of barely bridled lust, the whispered hush of his name. Powerless, able only to subject himself to the ply of Aziraphale's hands and body and lips. Aching for release, _begging, pleading_...

Aziraphale would not say such a thing out loud. How very wrong, it seemed, for an angel to feel so very aroused by the idea of seeing their lover quintessentially rendered powerless as a result of their visceral attentions.

And yet... it was a somehow undeniably delightful one. Crowley went to such great strains to always appear in control, unswayable. Delicately bored, even. Those moments in which this façade was shaken, where the true, innate sensitivity and vulnerability peaked through... well, it made Aziraphale feel closer to him. And when it was he what rendered these chinks in what might otherwise have been presented as infallible armour, it was... empowering.

It was hardly angelic to admit but he _enjoyed_ the feeling. He had spent a great deal of his life feeling uncertain about any number of things. Having some manner of power in this situation; to alter Crowley's state of mind and body, to grant him pleasure through the subtle crafting of select words and phrases...

"I would..." He paused a moment, considering what next he might say and whet his lips with his drink. He let himself go then; tracing his mind about the images what formulated his fantasies and gave borders to them by way of words:

"...lend my lips to the plains of your inside thighs. Wend them about to transcribe sacred and forgotten words to the valleys at the backs of your knees. Fashion my hands about the peaks of your hips, worshipping every sacred and decadent groove with my palms and my fingers. Tune my ears then to the sensuous sounds of your voice, crying out still for more, more still. Ever more and ever deeper. The softest, euphonious and most sensual of whispers as you give myself over to me."

Aziraphale had his eyes shut, head tilted back. There was distant pain still but the alcohol was helping. He was glad for it. He hadn't given particular form yet to the nature of this fantasy. He saw it now, clear as day within his own mind. Their naked bodies entwined, Crowley's legs parted to either side of him. And then around him. Mouth dropping open at the first movement what lay claim to the as so far untouched reaches of his body. Aziraphale had never so much as touched himself in an intimate manner but he could very much imagine what such a thing would be like. Could almost _feel_ it, in fact.

Crowley... _surrounding_ him.

"The most tender of embraces, what has never before been known. Your pulse... flutters beneath the inlay of my kiss. We find one another, in that unknown darkness and ascribe upon our bodies a love what is ageless, unsaturated... and _insatiable_."

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Any opportunity to get Aziraphale and Crowley a bit hot and steamy with each other is always good in my book ;) 
> 
> Also, I know that in the novel and the script book, it mentions that Crowley has a neighbour who rents the downstairs flat from him. It does not, however, turn up in the Amazon television series; which seems to indicate that Crowley's flat is entirely on one level and that the supposed elder lady of downstairs does not get summarily slaughtered by Ligur and Hastur when they swan on up to collect Crowley. Hence, why I decided in this that Crowley actually owns the flat directly below his own, and simply uses it, so as to store all his assorted brick-a-brack that he has accumulated throughout the centuries. 
> 
> Thanks as always everyone for reading, and I hope to catch you in the next update! Until then, and with all my infernal love;
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	29. Or, in which an angel gets a peek.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "See something you like?" He asked, rather rhetorically. Aziraphale had never been one to exercise particular subtlety when it came to the things that he enjoyed. And needless to say, the svelte, water bedewed body of the creature he loved, sensuous edges cradled by the soft lilt of candlelight, was a pleasure quite impossible from which to wrench the eyes. He felt that same desire what he might have experienced for a delicious dessert set down before him at the diner table. The incontestable want to place the scrumptious morsel upon his tongue, swirl it about his mouth and see how it tasted...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hi everyone! Thanks as always to all you lovely folks for reading and bookmarking, and especially thanks to those who are slapping that kudos button and commenting! I aim to upload a whole bunch of updates in the one go today, so I had best get cracking with it! I honestly can't wait to be done with it all, so that I can start rolling out the new content; which I am genuinely excited about!
> 
> This subdividing can make things a little confusing at times, so just keep in mind that this scene picks up directly from where the last chapter finished :) Hope you guys enjoy and I will see you on the far side!

**~X~**

* * *

From the other side of the bath, Crowley gave a not at all sexy sounding, rather the more aggravated moan. Aziraphale, a little off put by this, opened his eyes and glared over at the demon; the back of whose head was resting on the cedar wood border.

"Well, I _am_ sorry but I'm sort of new at all this!"

"No, no, no, it's not _that!_ It was... perfect, angel." Crowley sounded perfectly annoyed as he all but tipped himself forward and slurped from his drink. "Bloody perfect."

"Ah. I see that I fail to appreciate the façade of a demon what is clearly utterly beguiled in the face of literary seduction."

"No... _trust me_. That was..." The demon chuckled slightly, self-mockingly. "That was... amazing. ...Amazing enough that I realize you... really did make a good point earlier."

"About what?"

"About... it perhaps being more suited to, uh... other times." Crowley shifted in his seat, uncomfortably aware of his typically demanding sex organ and took another sip from his drink as some small means of distracting himself. "I'm thinking I probably can't get out of the bath for a while now."

Aziraphale stared back at him, face delicately poised between an expression what was both marginally disturbed and exhausted at the same time.

"Oh Good Lord... you truly found it _that_ exciting, did you?"

Exciting enough that it had taken every inch of his admittedly exceptional willpower to resist from touching himself during the recitation, but a demon digressed. "Oh, don't go and pretend like you're not in the same boat! You've got a male body too, you know what they're like! Sit on the backseat of a bus and they think it's bloody Christmas time." Crowley sipped from his glass, a smile pinching at the corners of his lips as Aziraphale cleared his throat and glanced off to that side in a gesture what perfectly demonstrated his acknowledgment of the demon's statement. "Just what did you expect after coming out with all that sexy talk?"

"It was _romantic_ talk." Aziraphale somewhat haughtily ascertained, to which Crowley resisted the near intolerable urge to blurt a raspberry at him.

"Uh-huh. You know, if you had quoted something like that back in the fourteenth century angel, you would have had your tongue cut out, your genitals hacked off with a hot blade and all your limbs tied to a quartet of horses, each the more unpredictable and easily spooked then the next. Whole villages would have been scandalized beyond the point of no return."

Aziraphale, for his part, appeared strangely proud of himself for this appraisal. "...Well, it's rather nice to think that in some time period I might have been considered scurrilous."

" _Ankle bones_ were considered scurrilous in the fourteenth century, my love. You would have left all those boorish finger knitters bleeding copiously from their nostrils with that sort of talk." And then, because Aziraphale was looking at him perculiarly, quirked his left brow and asked: "...What?"

"Sorry. Just..." The angel glanced down towards the water, smiling in a manner what made him look far younger than his ageless soul could ever attest to being. "Still getting used to it all. You know, the..."

" _Love_ stuff?" Crowley asked, amused. Aziraphale chuckled and then, concerned that Crowley would misinterpret his reaction, said:

"Not that I don't... that I'm not _pleased_ by it. Only to say-"

"It's all right, you don't need to pitch a fit." Crowley waved a hand airily as he sank back against the border of the _onsen_. Rose petals had wended themselves throughout the modest spattering of his chest hair; nestled in like perfumed squirrels in the leafy tussocks of a scraggly oak tree. "It's been six thousand years. We've been one thing for all that time, now we're... you know, _another_ thing. There's an adjustment period. I'm still getting used to it, too."

"You just seem so much more at ease with it all. I feel as though I'm... letting you down."

Crowley gave him a soft, dissuading look. "You're not letting me down. I see how hard you're trying. How hard you're fighting all that other stuff and nonsense going on in your head. If anything, I'm proud of you."

The praise was both flattering and reassuring. Aziraphale was quietly astounded by Crowley's patience. From what he had said, in their conversations preceding these moments, the demon had been longing for there to be something intrinsically more to their relationship than conversation (simple or otherwise) and reticent yearning. Feelings he had nursed for some many thousands of years already. That he could retain still that same respect and understanding of Aziraphale's difficulties with moving forward was both astonishing and demonstrably classy.

But then, this was a demon who asserted that style was the first and foremost means by which anyone ought conduct their day to day dealings and sought as much within his modest means to lead by example.

"Thank you." Aziraphale said, reaching down to dab idly at the rubber duck as it floated on by him again. It was a thing on which to focus, in a moment where he felt terribly shy all and ever the more tickled pink. "I'm proud of you too."

Crowley was confused by this, for he couldn't imagine for the life of him just what he might have done that should inspire a feeling so transcendental as 'pride' from an angel. "For what?"

"Well, you talk about us being 'one thing' for so many thousands of years. All that time, if you do recall, you _were_ actually a demon. And now look at you. Working in a nursing home -" Aziraphale smiled as Crowley quite typically tilted his head back and groaned his embarrassed dismay towards the ceiling. "- saying things that are kind, _doing_ things that are kind... falling in love. And with an _angel_ , nonetheless..."

He was pulled up short by Crowley's long foot emerging suddenly from beneath the foamy depths and splashing petal inculcated water all over his face. He shielded his wine glass just in time but took the remainder of the back spray in repayment.

"That'll be quite enough of that, thank you." Said the demon, his flushing face a pertinent sign of his reluctantly flattered embarrassment. It was certainly not as a result of the water, which was not nearly at a warm enough temperature to suit his own inexorably poor circulation.

" _Saying thank you_ -" Aziraphale added, smiling as he grazed his palm down the side of his glass, wiping free the water what had accumulated at the base. Crowley growled, turning his face into the waiting cordon of his own glass, as though he might dive so deeply into the interred wine that the compliments might be drowned out. It had always been a funny thing with him; this inability to abide genuine praise. But one supposed a demon was not designed to tolerate the application of 'praise', given what they were. No different to Aziraphale's celestial barbs, the angel supposed.

"Enough already. Just because I'm not on Hell's roster doesn't mean I don't still have a reputation to uphold."

" _What_ reputation?" Aziraphale scoffed, expectantly nonplussed. "You were a terrible demon. Always have been."

It was every bit as true as the Australian's cricket teams once ill advised foray into the realms of ball tampering and much in the same vein, Crowley did not much appreciate being called out on it.

"I've- I've, well..." He sputtered, trying all the while not to smile at the unconvinced cock of Aziraphale's well seasoned brow. "I'll have you know that I have done some positively _evil_ deeds in my time. Acts of such vile debauchery it would send your quills to quaking in your lily white wings, angel."

"I'm all ears." Spoke the afore-referenced angel, having known Crowley for the entirety of his having sauntered the far corners of the earth and understanding full well that acts of 'vile debauchery' were as foreign to him as the rings of Neptune. He could not even bring himself to step on a spider; though he would of course pretend as though he had obliterated the eight legged nuisance with all the malignance of a capitalist politician, all the while opening doors and otherwise 'shooing' the arachnid into some other inoffensive locale. And this was only partially as a result of his not wanting to dirty his much beloved, expensive and ironically cruel in its own right, snakeskin boots.

Crowley sputtered a little more, trying desperately to think of one standalone, truly evil thing that he had either pulled off himself or had encouraged humans to pull off on Hell's behalf. It was taking some certifiable brain power, because the human race was an innovative, impatient bunch and so had managed to outstrip him at every conceivable turn. If he had, in fact, possessed any real interest in starting wars, revolutions, fashionable torture devices and the like.

But Crowley, much as he might pretend otherwise, was a surprisingly gentle creature. Even whence posing as the dread Black Knight of King Arthur's time he had done precious little aside from spreading stories and grossly exaggerated tales of all the people he hadn't actually slayed. Word of mouth was ever the more powerful in those days. And no one cared to conduct murder investigations, after all. Life was cheap. Even in confrontations, he had left the actual 'cutting down' to the spattering of human clingers on what had drifted to his supposed 'cause', whilst doing his part in looking particularly tall and ominous and swinging his sword about in faster and faster rotations, mainly as to see whether he could actually write his name in the air.

"Well..." He drawled, dragging out the word beyond the point of absolute necessity. He pouted his lips, picked up his wine glass and took an exaggerated sip from the contents, playing for time. "Well, you see... the thing is..." He held out a cautionary finger, brushed a limpet of hair back from his face (it had been in no means in the way of anything) and sipped from his wine again. Aziraphale laughed to see it.

"You're stalling..."

Crowley responded in ever so mature fashion by taking something off of the nibblie platter and pitching it at Aziraphale. His arm wasn't particularly strong and there wasn't much venom in it. The pastry barely closed the gap, bouncing off of Aziraphale's distended forearm (whose reflexes were of course, much better) before dropping down into the water like a dead albatross.

"I'm trying to _think_! Cram a _hors d'oeuvre_ in your hole and shut up!"

"Oh, for go- It's landed in the water!" Aziraphale scooped up what Crowley had hopefully aspired to have been an ' _hors d'oeuvre_ ' with much the same urgency he might have demonstrated if it had been a drowning child. He examined its sad water logged form in a way that the demon obviously construed as being vaguely concerning.

"Don't you even _think_ about putting that in your mouth."

"I... I wasn't thinking about doing _that_." Aziraphale rather sort of lied. He was the sort of angel what might have otherwise gotten away with doing so.

"Oh, you _were_." Crowley knew Aziraphale perhaps better than the angel knew himself. "You're thinking about it _now_."

"Well... perhaps, but only because it seems such a dreadful waste of a crab puff."

"Give it back here, I'll pass you one that hasn't sopped up all of our accumulated body juices." Crowley took the crab puff, deposited its sad, bloated corpse upon the nibblie tray and exchanged it for a rather the more stout looking companion. He handed it to Aziraphale who looked equal parts pleased for the food and concerned as to his not having a plate or napkin in which to catch its likely expunging crumbs. "Ah!" Crowley slapped the water suddenly, though at a distance which was no longer at a risk to the angel in which he was sharing bathing space. "1918!"

"Please? The influenza epidemic?" Aziraphale said, rolling his eyes as he took to gingerly nibbling the corner of the _hors d'oeuvre_. There were crumbs flaking off every which way and he was forced to eschew his wine glass temporarily, in favour of catching them in his wet palm. "You had _nothing_ to do with that. It originated in _China_. You were tarting about over here at the time."

"I wasn't _tarting_." Crowley said, protesting the insinuation as to how his time was spent but not so much in Aziraphale offhandedly referring to him as a 'tart'. He found this a little sexy in fact, and made a note so as to bring it up again in future clothes-free exchanges. "I was working my butt off encouraging people to go travelling." He tilted his glass and flashed Aziraphale a both suitably mischievous and knowing look. "And _not_ cover their mouths when they sneezed."

"Don't think I don't know that you made rather hefty monetary donations to just about all of the hospitals in the greater United Kingdom during that time." Aziraphale said, all too eager to punch holes in Crowley's comparatively light hearted defence of his historical endeavours as he attempted to delicately imbibe a treat what was putting up much more in the way of protest. "And some what were overseas, as well."

"That's only because you were going and getting all upset. I just couldn't stand looking at that sulky face another moment longer."

"Mmm-hmm. And those children you were visiting that time I caught you in St. Bartholomew?"

Crowley might have known that Aziraphale could be trusted to remember every tiny demonstration of kindness he had exhibited throughout the years. Although it was far less the concern now that he was no longer on Hell's books but blessed if one could not have more the fun with playing the game.

"I was soothing my demonic heart with the blissful sounds of their drowning lungs." He said, which was most certainly a lie but one of which the financial department of Hell was hardly going to consider attributing to his once billable hours. "The phlegm riddled death hacks of small children is like a string quartet to my hellish ears, angel."

"You're choking up just trying to make a tasteless joke out of it." Aziraphale observed, hearing Crowley's voice crack and splinter off into an emotional waver. For he was not a demon what derived sport from the suffering of the would-be 'innocents' of the world. And Crowley had always been particularly clear on his perception of how 'potential' went hand in hand with 'innocence'.

It had been one of the arguments he had used to bring Aziraphale around to his plan of shaping the upbringing of the child whom they had (embarrassingly) supposed to be the Anti-Christ. The understanding that tailless mice would not give birth to likewise tail free children. That the shaping of, the construct as opposed to the biology, was instrumental in the formation of each and every living thing. Children were merely an untapped font of potential, which was the true, incontestable definition of 'innocence' in Crowley's mind.

And though he was not particularly enamoured with them (being clumsy, often sticky fingered and threatening so far as keeping nice clothes and nice cars and nice _anything_ was considered) he thought it a particularly classless act to take pleasure in their subjugation and/or suffering.

"Well, they were all so tiny," Crowley conceded, tilting his head back so as to prevent the angel from seeing his eyes well up. So, he may have had a soft streak but that shouldn't suggest he was required to air it out on a semi-regular basis. "You try finding anything at all amusing in seeing small, helpless humans born down by the choke of pneumonia, septicaemia and heliotrope cyanosis. The crowds of the Coliseum would have found it distasteful, and these were folks who wouldn't bat an eye at a lion slurping up some poor sods lower intestine like it was chicken pesto." He topped up his glass, gesturing to Aziraphale with the bottle and receiving an always polite 'no thank you' in return. "Killing kids is more along the lines of what _your_ former lot did to lift their skirts. Never been my cup of tea. Or glass of wine, really." He took another hearty gulp from his drink in commendation of the statement.

"Why don't you just admit," Aziraphale said, feeling in rather the mood to tease. "That you are a soft old serpent with the occasional, oftentimes endearing, mischievous streak and move on with it?"

Crowley's response was to growl dissuasively but in a manner what held nothing in the manner of weight.

"It's all right, you know. You said it yourself; our respective offices don't care what we do anymore. You have no need to bandy pretence, not for anyone's sake. Not even your own." Aziraphale sipped from his wine and smiled, going in for the metaphorical kill. It was all he could do to hold it together and not laugh in anticipation of how his forthcoming, purposefully gushy words were likely to affect the bashful demon. "And I for one think you're absolutely _wonderful_ the way that you are."

Crowley, glass still in hand, eased himself forwards off of the wooden bath seat and starting sinking both slowly and dramatically into the waiting grip of the foamy water.

"Okay. I'm going to go ahead and drown myself now." He established, seconds before the water rose to above his mouth. He went no further than this, large eyes staring unblinkingly at Aziraphale like a Nile crocodile awaiting the arrival of some unwary water buffalo into which to sink its teeth. It was all the more amusing for the way in which he persisted in keeping his left arm extended far above the surface of the water; protecting his wine.

Aziraphale laughed at the demon's furrowed brows, popping in the final crumbly piece of his crab puff before settling back comfortably onto his own seat.

"Fine. We shall talk about other matters then. Are you feeling prepared come Saturday?"

Crowley rose from the depths with a predictable dreary moan. It was a topic of conversation hardly the likely to be all that well received. Gretchen's funeral was scheduled for the upcoming Saturday and the past week had been dominated by frantic preparations, heightened emotions and necessary, oftentimes overzealous expenditures.

Aziraphale, being true to his word, had taken charge of all the arrangements; deferring to Crowley for the final say on all major decisions. He had wanted to take as much pressure off of the demon as possible, who was still surprisingly tender in regards to the whole affair. A factor Aziraphale quietly confessed to finding a little surprising. In six thousand years, death was far from a stranger and there had been humans they had both been somewhat the fond of in those long millennia.

"Well, _that's_ an uplifting change of conversation topic..." Crowley commented, picking up some indeterminate selection of antipasto from the plate and tossing it in-between his teeth. He hardly cared to eat at that moment, but it was something to do.

"I only meant to-"

"No, it's okay..." Crowley installed himself on the submerged seat once more, brushing his somewhat dry hair back off of his forehead. "Think we're all good to go. Thanks to you, mainly."

"Hardly." Aziraphale said, modestly. "I just made some phone calls. Put you in touch with a few people. You did most of the hard work." He considered a moment, swirling his wine about in the base of his glass. Such a rich red. He wasn't even sure what it was they were drinking but given how much effort the demon had gone into effecting 'romance' that evening, it was likely something suitably aged and thusly, expensive. "How do you feel you're going to go with the funeral being in a Chapel?"

There had been little in the way of choice concerning where Gretchen's funeral was to be held. The forecast for Saturday morning indicated that a storm was rolling in and heavy rains would persist for the remainder of the day. The funeral would be required to be undercover. And their only option, given that the entire affair was being otherwise hosted by the funeral home, was to hold it in their affixed chapel.

Chapel's were not quite so taxing on a demon as were Churches. Churches were consecrated, whereas Chapels were more your... light-hearted presentation of Heavenly prescience. It might best be described as the difference between receiving a sharp caning to the back of your knuckles in juxtaposition to a firm slap. Painful, yes but not the same flagrant degree of childishly shrieking severity.

"Managed all right the other day; when I was helping the mortician dress her, you know." Crowley murmured, his voice straight edged and reverent. He got like that, whenever they spoke of the arrangements. "Doesn't burn the ol' cloven hooves nearly as bad as a Church does."

"But it still burns a little."

"Kind of like holding a hot mug for too long. That sort of feeling."

"Would you be all right once you sat down and elevated your feet?" Aziraphale suggested, an image formulating in his mind of Crowley sitting on a pew in the chapel with his knees pressed up against his chest and feet elevated almost as high as his earlobes. There were more subtle means of doing so, he knew but most any action the demon undertook was supine to some degree of absurdity and drama. It was not an unfair assessment.

"Uh... not really. Then my arse just gets burned by association." Crowley gestured unnecessarily down towards the water; into which his aforementioned 'arse' was currently submerged. "Pew being in contact with the floor, floor being somewhat consecrated. That sort of thing."

"I see..." Aziraphale mused on this a while; his clever brain wending its way about any number of possible solutions. Much to be expected from a mind what was so adept at slaying otherwise ostentatious sudoku puzzles. "What if I bring a cushion?"

Crowley could not help but smile. This was ever so typical of the soft hearted Aziraphale, to search for a means to spare someone he cared for from experiencing but an ounce of discomfort.

"Still the same problem. Cushion touching the pew, pew touching the floor..."

Aziraphale's eyes widened. "What if we curse the cushion?" He suggested, supposing it to have been a particularly creative solution. Crowley wrinkled his upper lip uncertainly.

"Eh... then it would probably catch on fire, I'm thinking."

"Well, _you're_ cursed and I didn't see you catching on fire when you came dancing down the isle of that Church back in the forties."

"I'm not cursed, I'm _damned!_ And no, I'm not sure what exactly the difference is when it boils down to brass tacks, but I'm reasonably certain a cursed object would probably start smoking or otherwise behaving in an offbeat fashion during the service and I'll be a Djinni's nephew if I do anything to take the attention away from Gretchen."

"And here's _you_ trying to claim that you are not kind." Aziraphale smiled, wondering all the while whether Crowley was partway protesting simply because he was more the concerned about the proposed cursed cushion sending the seat of his trousers up in flames. He was correct in his assertions however, that such a thing would be considerably distracting. "I'm sure that Gretchen will be most pleased by all the hard work you've done."

"Well, she's hardly going to be pleased, is she?" Crowley said, pulling a face. "She's _dead._ "

Aziraphale rolled his eyes. " _Spiritually_ pleased. _Retrospectively_ pleased. Must you jump on me every single time I make a grammatical gaff?"

"I'd jump on you any time I had the chance, angel." Crowley said, with a sneaky (somewhat more the hopeful) smirk. "You know that."

"You know what? Go ahead and drown yourself. Just do me a favour and pass the nibblie platter first."

"You didn't eat enough at dinner?"

Aziraphale had in fact eaten enough to otherwise service a small outlying village in Peru, but being full meant nothing so far as his tastebuds were concerned. "What can I say? I simply find a roughly chopped kabana and a store bought block of sweaty brie unceremoniously plopped onto a plate with a handful of crumbly water crackers simply _too_ irresistible to pass up."

It cheered Crowley up to no end, Aziraphale giving him something of a stirring. He had gotten better at it these past few months and to Crowley it represented a deepening degree of affection between the pair. To pick fun and to laugh at one another's expense. Being teased by Aziraphale was still oft times unexpected and enjoyable and made him feel every bit as warm as he might have done when ensconced in the angel's embrace.

"Oh. Oh I see how it is now. Cheeky bastard." He pitched another piece of what-not from the platter at Aziraphale, who rather impressed him by catching it in one hand.

"Would you stop that?! There's going to be bits of food floating all around the bath now."

"Just do what ducks do. Puddling, isn't that what you call it?"

"I'd hardly feel safe to puddle around you at the moment." Aziraphale fairly assessed and they shared in the laughter of it, Aziraphale surreptitiously partaking of the treat he had fairly snatched from the clutches of water based decimation.

"Are you, uh... planning on staying over tonight?" Crowley asked, once the final titters of his amusement had faded away. Aziraphale examined the crumbs what still adhered themselves to his fingers, flicking them over the rim of the bath to where a hapless Roomba might stumble across them at some scheduled venture. Or Crowley magicked them away, one or the other.

"Well, if it was all right with you." He said, not feeling nearly so overwhelmed by the prospect as he might once have done. By his estimates, they had now shared the same bed at least six times. And surprisingly once safely tucked up in said bed, things seemed far the more relaxed and sedentary than any of the moments otherwise leading up to their entering the bedroom. "Saves you driving me all the way back to the bookstore."

"Oh, I'd make you catch a bus. You ain't getting chauffeured at this hour, angel."

"Of course you would." They both smiled at this, knowing full well that Crowley would have still gone to the effort (with a grizzly pretence all the while) of driving Aziraphale all the way across town if the angel had requested it. It was enjoyable to otherwise pretend, however. "I thought it might be nice if we... propped ourselves up in bed... watched a talkies together, maybe?"

Crowley had, much as you would expect, a generous and palatial bedroom. He had a four poster bed, with black sheets, black pillows and a black canopy. He had once, in one of his more inane of moments, also purchased silk sheets. They did not lend themselves well to his preference of also wearing silk pyjama's. It was rather like attempting to sleep on a water slide. And once, when one of his toenails had not been so carefully clipped, he had fair enough scalped the entire mattress when attempting to climb out of bed; dragging the bottom sheet along from where it had affixed itself to his raggedy nail. He had switched then to Egyptian cotton, which breathed well and still looked suitably stylish.

He did not have coverlets and duvets and all the other fussy swish and pomp what Aziraphale ascribed to his snoozing space. But he did have a good spattering of blankets, quilts and a couple of decorative pillows. All black, though some might have had a stylish gold trim if one were to look closely enough.

It was a bed far the more suited to sharing than Aziraphale's. It was not a single, for one, but King sized, with plenty of rolling room and space in which one might spreadeagle their limbs if they got too cramped or too hot during the night. Crowley was unable to regulate his body temperature as effectively as a human being and was constantly needing to shift about so as to either warm up or cool down, where appropriate. This was near to impossible in Aziraphale's tiny bed.

Not that he disliked the forced closeness, but it got just the slightest bit annoying when he was constantly required to fling back the bedding, jutting his foot out like a seal extending its fin from the water so as to feel it warmed by the sun. Crowley, in contrast, would do this so as to lower his body temperature; ripping his socks off at some point during the night, only to then go crawling about, half in, half out of the bed in a bid to locate them and slip them back on.

Sharing a bed had made life easier in this regard. If he needed to warm up, it was a simple matter of wrapping himself about Aziraphale's toasty body like a burrito. And Aziraphale was always the strangely accommodating in regards to this. He never appeared to be get uncomfortable and did not often move in those times that he did sleep. Laying in the same position; on his back, legs straight, hands (if one was not wrapped about Crowley's shoulders) set upon the rise of his stomach. Much like a vampire, with an appetite for cheesecake in place of sanguine fluid.

Another decadent aspect of Crowley's bedroom was the big screen television he'd had installed on the wall opposite the bed. Crowley rather liked television and had been instrumental, in his time, of contributing to the rise of reality programming in particular. When not otherwise occupied with the various goings on of which a creature like Crowley might otherwise be occupied, the demon could be most often found perched upon his bed, glass of wine in hand and partaking of some mind numbing televised garbage.

In the few times they had shared the bed at Crowley's flat (one or two nights that very week, in fact) the angel and the demon had drifted into something of a comfortable routine; watching a movie together over a good glass of wine or two before settling down for the night. It felt very cosy and very natural. And oftentimes Crowley would end up drifting off to sleep before he could attempt anything too frisky, for which Aziraphale could only be relieved given his own conflagrating difficulties in this area.

"They don't call them _talkies_ anymore, angel." Crowley grumbled, cutting free a piece of the 'sweaty' brie and sticking it into his mouth whilst still affixed to the cheese knife. "Movies, remember?" He said, mouth still full. " _Movies_?"

"Right. Of course. A movie, then." Aziraphale said, still thinking it was as equally a stupid name for a motion picture. _Things move about in them. What shall we call them? Oh, I know; movies!_

"Sounds good to me." Crowley staved a cracker into his mouth as an afterthought. He was courteous enough to keep his mouth shut whilst he chewed and worked over in his head just what they might have enjoyed watching together. Their tastes ran complimentary some of the time but like any other couple, they differed on a number of select genres. "I've got Netflix. Stan. Amazon Prime. Not much worth watching on Amazon Prime, come to think of it..."

"I'm sure we'll find something that we both enjoy." Aziraphale frowned, snapping his fingers at the platter which had been sectioned off somewhat to Crowley's side of the bath for whatever the reason. "And honestly, just how is that nibblie platter supposed to be arriving to my side of the bath? International express?"

"Say what you will, but those bastards seem eerily efficient." Crowley said, plucking up the tray with one hand and passing it to Aziraphale. Having performed his duty and feeling far the more pruney by the moment, the demon swivelled about in the water, setting his wine glass off to the side before hoisting himself up the steps and out of the _onsen_ proper. A towel whipped into his hand from somewhere out of the surmounting shadows and he lent it to the concave of his lower back. "Right. Well, I'll go on ahead and set things up. Let you stuff yourself in peace."

Aziraphale quite nearly forewent the very means by which to otherwise stuff himself, having fumbled with the food tray as Crowley shamelessly swished his naked body up out of the water. Apparently the demon had taken great strides in overcoming his body centric bashfulness. A development, Aziraphale confessed, which was admittedly rather the pleasing one.

_Dear Lord above, that bottom_ , the angel internally purred, watching as Crowley swished a black bath blanket across the pert globes of said bottom; humming contentedly as he went about his business. He turned so as to perhaps call something over his shoulder, catching Aziraphale mid-stare and smirked.

"See something you like?" He asked, rather rhetorically. Aziraphale had never been one to exercise particular subtlety when it came to the things that he enjoyed. And needless to say, the svelte, water bedewed body of the creature he loved, sensuous edges cradled by the soft lilt of candlelight, was a pleasure quite impossible from which to wrench the eyes. He felt that same desire what he might have experienced for a delicious dessert set down before him at the diner table. The incontestable want to place the scrumptious morsel upon his tongue, swirl it about his mouth and see how it tasted.

It was enough in fact to denounce his usual gentlemanly decorum and he did not redirect his gaze for want of being caught but took to casting it down along the lines of Crowley's body instead. Studying, enjoying. Visually breathing it in, such as the nose might alight to the pleasant sensation of freshly cut grass.

"I rather like every perfect inch that I see." Aziraphale said; a comment which rendered Crowley the more expectantly bashful for hearing it. Never the mind how the angel's eyes had unashamedly taken to drinking him in. "That lovely bottom, in particular."

"I think it's safe to say you've already made your thoughts on _that_ abundantly clear." Crowley softly teased, effacing confidence whilst still keeping the front of his body facing away from the angel. This was more than enough, a view such as this. Keep a little mystery, and all that.

He finished drying off, biting his lower lip in obvious pleasure of the angel's appraisal and then tossed the bath towel haphazardly towards the vague direction of the wash basket. He scooped up his phone before sauntering to the bathroom door, intending to change into his pyjama's, which he had strategically placed upon his bed earlier. He paused just long enough to flash what he hoped to be a suitably sultry look (one of which he had practiced in the mirror for some time earlier that day) over his still bare shoulder.

"Don't keep me waiting."

He swished out of the room to internal triumphant fanfare, feeling he had done rather the very good job in piquing Aziraphale's reticent hormones. The hormonal angel of which, was now fighting some increasingly insistent and ever the more violent celestial spurs, which were jabbing into his sides as though he were an obstinate horse refusing to carry its sadistic rider any further across the rocky plains of the greater Utah.

"Truly diabolical." Aziraphale muttered, attempting to quash the tide of barely repressed desire by cramming as much of the contents of the nibblie platter into his mouth as possible. His appetite had always been rapacious, but if temptations such as this were continued to be presented to him (which was a certainty, given virtue of who Crowley was) then he was more the likely to approach the approximate girth of your above average sea cow before the month was out.

**~X~**

* * *


	30. Or, in which Humility proposes a hard left.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The point is we don't have to just cry about it."
> 
> Superbia lifted a finger from the side of his glass and pointed it reproachfully at Humilitas's innocent face. "Don't you start in on this again."
> 
> "On what again?" Patientia asked, naturally confused. She of course had not been in attendance during the 'pillow talk' portion of their plane trip. Talk which Superbia had all but smothered out of existence by means of anything short of an actual pillow.
> 
> "Nonsense talk, that's what. Too much time spent with the sad humans of the down and out set." The Capital Vice of Pride made ever so much a display out of dropping his bottom lip and rubbing a knuckle into the corner of his eye mockingly. "Starting to believe his own bullshit about shooting high and seizing the day. World is your oyster and all that pish."
> 
> "We don't have to go through with it, you know." Humilitas softly, yet tenaciously repeated. Superbia responded by leaning back so dramatically on their bar stool that they nearly flipped themselves designer arse over tit. Groaning his disgust towards the looming, girder wreathed ceiling above.
> 
> "And he's going there..."
> 
> "We could refuse. Put up a fight..."

**~X~**

* * *

Aziraphale might have been concerned as to how Crowley intended the rest of their evening to play out, but was relieved to find that the demon's demonstrations in the bathroom had been little more than a salacious tease.

Having hurled his own dripping body out of the bath, drying and neatly dressing in his pyjama's, Aziraphale took up the wine bottle and the two glasses, staggered a deep (not nearly calming enough) breath and then stepped on out into the bedroom.

Crowley was not in fact awaiting him, still naked and splayed out upon a bed quite as weighed down with rose petals as the now draining bath water had been, but dressed in his own nightwear and perched up against a towering stack of pillows, all but glaring daggers into the glowing screen of the television as he flicked about between selections.

It was a strange feeling; quite as much relief as it was in fact disappointment. But a cosy evening was hardly a compromise, Aziraphale reminded himself, feeling slightly more cheery as he topped up their wine glasses and assumed his place alongside Crowley in the bed. The demon immediately snaffled a hold of his glass as though he were a high flyer in a rapidly descending plane and it was the oxygen mask intended for the small child he had been charged with taking care of. He pushed his face insistently then against Aziraphale's shoulder, repeating the act until the angel compliantly raised his arm and permitted him to curl in under it and lean against him.

 _Had he always been so needy?_ Aziraphale wondered, using his fingers to brush Crowley's still slightly damp hair back off of his face. The demon naturally gave a defiant swish of his head to mess it up again and tittered softly to himself at the angel's wearied sigh.

They watched the movie that Crowley had gone ahead and selected. Less than a half hour in, the angel was entirely certain that his companion was far the more enjoying the selection than he was.

"Why, exactly, did we decide on the _Exorcist_ again?" He asked, staring down at the mussed head of red hair curled in contentedly under his arm. "And by we, I mean _you?_ "

"Why? Because it's a scream." Crowley tilted back his head and laughed raucously at something that was happening on screen, which Aziraphale rather interpreted as requiring a far more solemn reaction.

"Yes, well, it is rather." The angel winced, closing his eyes and bringing his wine glass up to his lips and just about draining it in the one go. He could see that another trip to the kitchen for a restock was imminent. "I thought we might have watched something a little more light-hearted. A romance, perhaps?"

"Didn't want you getting any ideas. Hard enough as it is trying to keep your greedy little mitts off of me."

Aziraphale chuckled at the somewhat sneaky and ironic statement. "Ah, of course. This movie serves as something of a passion killer then?"

"Well, _something's_ got to. When here I am looking so ravishing in my silk pyjamas. To say nothing of you and those pin stripes." Crowley rolled his tongue to produce a suggestive purr. "Not careful it'll get the other sort of R rated in here."

"Yes, well. We certainly dodged a bullet there." Aziraphale chanced looking back towards the screen and rather wished that it hadn't. "This is worse than that nonsense you made me watch the other night. _Ghost Shark_ , is that what it was called?"

Crowley laughed so hard at the memory of this that Aziraphale suspected he might soon be in need of resuscitation. He himself had known the film to have been absolute, unequivocal garbage and had somehow or another managed to talk Aziraphale around into believing that there was some subtle, intrinsic meanings what to be interpreted from the subject matter; which the angel had then spent the majority of the dreadful film hunting for. All whilst in the midst of being gobsmacked, uncertain and then, after an hour of Crowley managing to keep a straight face, superlatively furious.

Having observed a scene in which the titular ghost shark burst from a fire hydrant and bisected a group of admittedly impertinent children, Aziraphale finally surrendered to his temper and rounded on Crowley with an embittered shriek of, _"Are you SERIOUS with this bombast, right now?!"_ to which the demon responded with howls of laughter so extreme that he had eventually rolled himself off of the side of a bed what had otherwise plenty of room to spare for exaggerated fits of revelry.

"I will _never_ forgive you for that." Aziraphale murmured, thinking that even for an immortal being, the viewing of _Ghost Shark_ had managed to somehow snaffle a portion of his life force what he might never be able to get back. That was the true monster of the piece; cinematography so bad that it made you lose whatever hope you might have in the human race possessing redeemable qualities. "I swear, if you are in need of identifying one truly evil thing that you have done in your time, then forcing me to sit through that nonsense takes the cake."

"You know, there's a sequel." Crowley said, raising his hand slowly off of bedsheet, the television remote clutched threateningly between his fingers. Aziraphale reached over, took Crowley by the wrist and pinned his hand back down against the mattress.

"I will kill you in your sleep, you foul fiend." And then, because Crowley truly looked so genuinely happy in that moment, the angel felt himself softening and pulled him in a little closer to his chest with a contented chuckle. The tenderness of the moment was immediately brokered by another awful development on screen, which left a rather sort of nasty taste in Aziraphale's mouth. "Oh, I'd forgotten just what a _ghastly_ film this is."

"It's not ghastly. It's a hoot! Although, I probably only see it that way because I took the actual Pazuzu to watch it when it first came out." Crowley suddenly hauled himself up out of bed and crossed to a cabinet on the other side of the room. He swung the doors open, revealing (hardly at all, to Aziraphale's surprise) a well stocked liquor cabinet. He tapped a finger against his lip a moment, surveying his options before plucking down a bottle of _2015 Domaine Trapet Pere and Fils Gevrey-Chambertin Ostréa_." I tell you; you should have seen the _look_ on her face!"

"So, Pazuzu chooses to identify as a woman when they dwell on earth?" Aziraphale asked, knocking back the last dribble of his wine so that his glass was empty. Perhaps it was a snobby thing, but he could not morally abide the mixing of wines. Crowley was another story. The demon might indeed have expensive tastes but he was also very much the type to believe that if the wine was good, who cares if it was mixed in together? It was a sort of alcoholic representation of fusion dining; another thing which Aziraphale found very difficult to wrap his high brow head around.

"Up here, yeah. She's actually more your shy, retiring type. Was mortified thinking that this is the impression she was now going to be making on the human populace." Crowley crossed the room, uncorking the bottle as he came and then pouring an always generous helping into Aziraphale's readily proffered glass. "' _For Satan's sake, Crowley! What sort of self-respecting demon is about to go interfering with themselves using a crucifix?! Makes your standard UTI look like a walk in the park!_ '" He chuckled at his emulation of a verily affronted Pazuzu, crawling over Aziraphale's lap, so as to tuck himself back into his pre-established nest and fetching up his still quarter full wine glass off of the bedside table. "Poor thing was _so_ embarrassed. Couldn't even look at me when we left the cinema. There one minute and the next-" He made a harsh, slurping sound from around his lower row of teeth; like someone with far too much an accumulation of saliva attempting to emulate a vacuum cleaner. "-straight back on down to Hell. Didn't come out of her room for about a decade!"

"I feel oddly sympathetic. It would be rather how I think you might feel if anyone were to make a movie about you." Aziraphale glanced sidelong at Crowley, not so subtly digging for information. "Using your... actual... demonic name."

Crowley did not give him the satisfaction of playing into it. "Never going to happen, angel." He said, topping up his glass, plonking the wine bottle down upon the table and wriggling down into his comfortable nook beneath Aziraphale's arm. "Ain't no one going to find that name appealing enough to want to whack it on the big screen."

"Oh, and why is that? Is it an... embarrassing name?"

Crowley glanced up at him and gave a small smile. He could see through the angel's not so cleverly phrased constructs as though they were made out of glass what was assiduously attended to by an obsessive compulsive cleaning man with too much time on both squeegee wielding hands.

"Love? How's about you go and leave the manipulating to those of us who've had some practice at it? If this were a violin lesson you'd be clearing out the music class by now."

Aziraphale turned back to the screen with a haughty sniff. It was a sore point with him; having Crowley maintain such secrecy concerns his past and... well, his _other_ life in Hell. He rather felt as though in Crowley's sequestering this information away, that he was maintaining some means of distance between them. Keeping something for himself.

Aziraphale himself had nothing in the way of secrets. His life, appropriately enough, was an open book. A book what Crowley had been free, at any given point, to thumb through, dog ear, drop crumbs in.

Aziraphale didn't much like secrets. He had kept his own in the past, especially during those times leading up to the Would-be-Apocalypse. He had felt enormous shame in doing so. Placing trust in someone was an integral means of both deepening and cementing the foundations of your relationship. And given how much emphasis Crowley clearly placed on this, it was astonishing to Aziraphale that he would still perpetuate some small means of keeping him at arms length.

"I _will_ find out one day, you know." The angel said, very much meaning it.

"Sure you will." The demon replied, not at all concerned with the aforementioned angel making any traction in this regard. Who was he about to up and ask, after all?

"Your demonic name _and_ your angelic name. It's only a matter of time."

"Why is this so important to you?" Crowley growled, twisting his head about so as to meet Aziraphale's eyes. The insistence on the matter annoyed him, but not for the reason's Aziraphale imagined it to be. "This need to know the names what some other schmucks decided in their infinite and or diabolic wisdom to bestow upon me? Isn't it enough that you have known me by the name that I have actually _chosen_ for myself? The only name by which I recognize myself? The name by which _you_ have come to know me?"

It was a very true and humbling point and Aziraphale felt more the self-indulgent and callous for having suspected duplicity in Crowley's intentions. He knew the demon well and knew that he placed great emphasis on choice; being that there was so little of it to be found in Hell. The same was true of Heaven.

What precious autonomy Crowley had been able to exercise in his life had been in how he chose to present himself. By way of a name, what clothes he might wear, the gender he might ascribe to. They were things over which both Heaven and Hell had no control and likely had no particular concerns regards but it was nonetheless extraordinarily empowering.

Aziraphale could appreciate this. He too had long been a cog in the overarching machine that was the preternatural universe. Any small means by which you might assert your individuality and ascertain as a result why said decisions were indescribably important was validation of the very construct of your existence. Heaven and Hell had bestowed upon Crowley the names by which he had been expected to be recognized but the definitive point in his having chosen his own name was to say that he still existed as a separate, autonomous being, whose thoughts and designs were his and his alone.

It was yet another sign of his inordinate courage, Aziraphale fondly thought. Not only to have negated the point of his chosen names but to rather then insist on his brethren adopting that same name in how they then referred to him.

Had Satan chosen Crowley's demonic name for him? If so, his refusing to adhere to it, must have been viewed as offensive. It was commendable really, that he had managed to maintain his reputation as Hell's 'Poster Child' for so long. A little devil, what could talk a very big game.

"Of course it does." Aziraphale said with a smile, lending his lips between a part in Crowley's hair and bestowing a kiss to his forehead. "But one such as yourself really has no leg to stand on when it comes to chastising others for their curiosity."

" _Shhh_." Crowley said, holding up his free hand and pinching his thumb and fingers together. "I'm trying to watch, blabberwings."

"You know what's going to happen. You've seen it over a hundred times, already!"

"Shoosh!"

"Should have brought a book." Aziraphale grumbled, taking a good natured sip from his wine. Crowley waved the hand that he had only earlier used to admonish Aziraphale up in front of the angel's face like the wayward leg of the Kraken reaching for a Japanese research ship.

"Rub my hands if you want something to do."

Aziraphale set his wine down and put his disquieted energy into massaging the demon's hands. It had been a long week, you see and Crowley, much to the surprise of anyone who thought that they knew him, had been working very hard.

**~X~**

* * *

_**Friday - 12th of April, 11:23am** _   
_**Arrival Lounge, London Airport** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

People paid Patientia little mind as she sat, rolling a cigarette on a nondescript bench in the arrivals lounge.

If they did notice her, it was more the likely a natural side effect of the female body she currently inhabited being of extraordinary beauty and possessing of a rare elegance which seemed to be almost in direct contrast to the somewhat grotty task in which she was currently engaged.

She was tall, with long dark brown hair and exquisite Asiatic features. Her almond shaped eyes were sharply upturned and her dark red lips formed a perfectly accented bow when she smiled.

She had not been smiling much lately. She was also making something of a small mess with the tobacco she was attempting to feed into the rollie paper; her fingers trembling as though she was besieged of Parkinson's.

She fairly leapt out of her skin at the light nudge she received to her right shoulder.

"small world, huh..." Said the petite, somewhat pungent figure what had managed to creep up on her; smiling from beneath the hood of their white, thematic sweater. Patientia made strains to slow the unnecessarily accelerated pattering of her human heart.

"That's the rumour going around." She patted the seat beside her with long, elegant fingers; currently beflaked by spats of tobacco. "You'll be wanting to take a load off."

"it's like you know me." The figure said, taking a bag from around their shoulders which was adorned with numerous badges, decorations and Hello Kitty key tags and flumped down into the seat with as little elegance in their poise as there was an abundance of it in Patientia's.

This odiferous specimen is Acedia. The Capital Vice of Sloth. As you would expect, they were the least busy of all their compatriots. Small in statue, dressed in crumpled clothing and with tangled weaves of mousy brain hair what clung to an obstinate corner of cool ranch Dorito, they were slobiness incarnate. They ascribed to no physical sex or gender for no more the compelling reason than their simply being too lazy to make a concrete decision concerns the matter.

"That's one way of putting it." Patientia said, smiling tolerantly as she returned her attention to her rollie. Her hands were shaking a lot less now that she had some company. Acedia might have been a remarkably fusty creature (and rather the more in desperate need of a shower) but they were a particularly laid back and often good natured individual. Their very essence was almost definitively opposed to raising nerves and or affiliate blood pressure.

"shame..." They said, with their usual tired sigh. Slumped so dramatically in their seat that their back was near flush with the base. "i mean... know it's gotta happen and all but... new w _orld of warcraft_ coming out... never gonna find out if they get the s _ilent hill_ series back on track." They puffed a long, slow desolate breath out and even this much effort seemed far too demanding. "had some plans, you know..."

"Didn't we all." Patientia agreed, rolling the paper firmly about the tobacco and wetting the edges with her tongue, binding it together. Acedia glanced up at her, from the one eye visible from behind their stained hood.

"you, uh... heard anything from...?"

Patientia felt that familiar edge of cold dread work its way back into her steadying nerves. She made to reply, but a fussing, gaggling crowd of people surging from out of one of the arrival gates cut her off short. With a smile, she flashed Acedia a knowing look; eyes twinkling with amusement.

"Superbia?"

Acedia smirked, sharing in her reaction. "mr Schmick himself. private jet, no less. nice for some..." They gave another low, dragging sigh. "some of us, had to travel third class..."

"Considering you haven't retained gainful employment in all the time you've been on earth, the only surprising thing about that statement is that you weren't in fact stowed away in the cargo hold." Patientia said, taking the rollie and slipping it into a shiny, elegant looking cigarette case and using a delicate leather strap to pin it in place.

"i blog. ...Occasionally. when i can be bothered." Acedia shrugged, reaching long, grime flecked nails beneath their hood and scratching at their scalp. Flakes of dandruff skittered down over the bib of their sweatshirt like a shower of putrescent snow. "eh... what's it all matter, days end, neeh? you can afford to be me when your better half is the literal embodiment of hard work. never down a pound, much."

"And yet Industria didn't care enough to spring for first class plane tickets, I gather?"

"i wasn't going to be bothering her with any of this." Acedia murmured, which may have seemed a rare effort of generosity, if it had not applied to Acedia. Their other half, the Principle virtue of Industry was hard working, selfless and far too generous for their own good. "too much like hard work, really. which, as you know, is rather sort of contrapositive to everything I stand for. slouch for, you know..." Acedia flapped a hand lazily about in the air, as a familiar figure finally emerged from the over contentious crowd in which they were interred. "oi. fancy-pants."

Superbia raised an imperious hand; a curt indication that he would attend to them shortly, before returning his attentions to the plethora of anxious employees what swirled about him like wasps dancing attendance upon an open bottle of lemonade.

Superbia had been many things in his six thousand years on earth. Small business owner, large business owner, a prince, a Lord, a pop singer, a runway model, a recurrent string of artists (starving and affluent alike) a critic of food, fashion, films and music and, when he felt he needed to slow down and relax little, a used car salesman.

In this life, he was the CEO of an enormous, internationally branching multi-conglomerate, whose Headquarters were located smack pip in the middle of bustling Hong Kong. His corporation oversaw a contingency of profitable domains; not all of them legal and his accumulative wealth after so many thousands of years was enough to purchase the world thrice over.

He was tall, sublimely proportioned and very, _very_ Caucasian. White males, he gleaned some centuries back, epitomized power and this was precisely what he wished to emulate. Human males also had a habit of equating success with the amount of people they slept with. With this in mind, Superbia currently held the uncontested record for the most sex had with the most people of any creature what existed.

He would have most likely have been riddled with every sexually transmitted infection ever recorded but that was where preternatural magic came in handy. And being a Vice, he was naturally sterile and so there was never any the risk of his leaving behind generation upon generation of offspring, that he would have been predisposed to ignore anyway.

Superbia had thick, well groomed hair, a handsome face with both cold and lascivious eyes and was one of the few creatures in known creation what could wear a suit with a white jacket in an unironic fashion and get away with it.

Pride may very well have come before the fall, but in all his six thousand years, Superbia had enjoyed nothing but the greatest of success in all his ventures. Most of his brethren would attest this to his being far too arrogant to abide the mortal potential of failure. They were very much correct.

When he was done scribbling his electronic signature on proffered iPad's, slinging instructions into the ear of one of his three assistant's and whatever else it was such a very important person like himself was required to do, Superbia made a gesture which effectively shooed his jabbering contingency away to other preferred parts and sloped on over to where Patientia and Acedia awaited.

"Acedia. Animated, as usual." He received a limp, unimpressed sneer from his fellow Vice. "Patientia. How is my favourite Virtue?"

Patientia rose to her feet and extended her arms. Superbia wrapped her up, firm and uncompromising as was the norm. "Don't let Humilitas hear you say that." She said, giving him a pat on the back as they parted. "Where is he, anyway?"

"yeah, figured you'd at least do the poor guy a solid and pick him up on your way through..." Acedia said, attention now occupied by what looked like a fully restored retro Gameboy which was turned up much louder than their companions preferred.

"Of course I did." Superbia turned, gesturing over towards the baggage carousel with his clef chin. "Silly bastards gone and gotten himself caught up with the luggage."

Patientia glanced over to see a thinly framed Japanese man, wearing thick reading glasses and pants that were elevated just a scoch too high for anyone's good, struggling to extricate an enormous and extravagant looking bag comprised of pink leopard print material off of the carousel. The luggage was so heavy, in fact, that the poor fellow got himself just about dragged onto the conveyer belt in his efforts to retrieve it.

"Oh, you didn't go and lump him with all your belongings, did you?"

"No lumping required." Superbia said, plaintively unconcerned as he scratched the inside of his ear. "Couldn't stop the stupid beggar. Besides, least he could do for an all expenses paid trip."

"you say that as though you didn't get anything out of it..." Acedia said with a knowing look. They all knew what they had been insinuating. That Superbia and Humilitas had made up for the time they'd spent apart by desecrating whatever expensive furniture was installed in the back of the private jet. All of which was likely rendered from any number of currently existing animal print designs.

Superbia gave a haughty sniff, though they did not look in the least bit ashamed of himself. Shame was, of course, very the far removed from the nature of pride.

"You know your business, Sloth. Why don't you mind it?"

"Here he comes now." Patientia cocked her head sympathetically. "Oh, look at him, poor dear. He looks like a pack mule."

"He's fine, he loves doing that sort of thing. Virtues thrive on self-sacrifice, you should know that."

"You're awful." Patientia glanced a reproachful hand off of Superbia's arm before drifting over to provide assistance to Humilitas. The Principle Virtue of Humility looked rather more like a Sherpa, given the ludicrous amount of baggage hanging from every available limb. "Here. Pass some of that over, dear."

"Oh, don't go and do that to the poor guy." Superbia called out, making no such move to provide assistance. Long gone were the days when he was forced to haul his own belongings about. "What'll he have to complain about later?"

"Complaints are a vice, _Su-tan_." Humilitas gently reminded, with an affectionate smile for his other half that most of their kind would consider underserved on Superbia's part. "Far more up your alley, wouldn't you say?"

"i don't want to hear what's up either of your alleys, thank you..."

"Meow." Superbia hissed, making a claw of his left hand and raking it through the air at Acedia; slumped in their seat like a wet moth. "That, ladies and gentleman, is the sound of a Vice who _hasn't_ been getting any."

"Industria on their way yet?" Patientia asked, to which Acedia gave a non-committal sort of grunt; more the focused on getting her digital character to launch themselves over some manner of obstacle on the Gameboy.

"In transit. Next couple of days or so."

"Where are they coming in from?"

"Mexico."

"Ah." Patientia said, simply. Seemed appropriate, really.

"So..." Humilitas mused, setting down the larger of the four bags he was lugging and bracing his arms against the extended handle. "Here we are. _Psychomachia_ , round two."

"Oh, don't even start." Superbia snapped, rubbing a hand across his botoxed forehead as though it were him, rather than his counterpart, what had reason to be exhausted. "It's going to be bad enough with Humanitas. _Waaagggh, waaaaghh_ , the end of the world, everyone dead, all that anti-kindness, _waaaaghhh..._ "

"You can't pretend as though you haven't gotten attached to certain aspects of this world yourself, _Su-tan_." Humilitas said, with a gentle look at his vain, moody counterpart. "Six thousand years is a long time."

"You don't gotta tell me." Superbia grumbled, hands wedged into his designer pockets. He did look rather put off, Patientia thought. "All the hard work I've piled into this little rock, just to see it go up in smoke?" He sighed, permitting the ever so slightest hint of vulnerability to flicker out. "Hard pill to swallow."

"what do you suppose happens next?" Acedia asked, genuinely curious enough to glance up from their game. "You know... after it's all done?"

Humilitas bit his lip. "Uncertain. Think we'll, uh..." He jerked a thumb upwards. Not towards the sky, or to Heaven, even. "Return?"

"Hard to know what the old girls got planned." Patientia said. It was a strange prospect, the idea of them 'going back'. It had been so long spent away... though it was unlikely much had changed. Time held a different construct in that place. "Plays Her cards close to her chest, that one."

"Wouldn't hurt for Her to be a little more upfront." Superbia said, which was not a, so far as he was concerned, unreasonable request. "We're supposed to be working together, after all."

"she makes the calls." Acedia jabbed their thumb hard enough to one of the game devices little red buttons, just about jamming it in the process. Perhaps they were not so nonchalant as they appeared to be. "We just dance to the beat of the drum."

"Is there any news concerns...?" Humilitas started to ask, with an anxious glance towards Patientia. She raised a hand, cutting him off. Not wanting to hear _that_ name. In no place right now, to be potently _reminded_ of the name.

"He's on his way. ...Should be hitting the shore about three days or so."

"How did he even...?"

"How do you suppose?" Patientia glanced towards the ceiling, an uncharacteristic ribbon of resentment unfurling from within their chest. _All for want of Her Great Plan... the suffering what I must endure because She still wishes to play child's games in dark rooms._ "She finds a way. She always does. Pulls a string and then _bam_."

"It just... it's so irregular." Humilitas said thoughtfully, dropping with a sudden, dramatic shriek as the handle on the luggage unlocked and shot back down into the confines of the bag. He took a moment to re-extend it, paying no attention to Superbia's pleased chortles in the background. "I mean... she's the one what dispelled him in the first place."

"not like matters can proceed without him on board, though..." Acedia drawled, clearing the level and waiting for the next one to load up. They had finished the game countless times already, but habitual routines were comforting to someone as sedentary as them. Especially in times of great change, such as this. "all of us need to be together. balanced out..."

"Would you care for one of us to accompany you?" Humilitas offered, reaching over to give Patientia's slender wrist a comforting squeeze. "Make attempts to-"

"Humanitas has already offered. Thank you." She sighed, wanting to smoke that cigarette more by the moment. "I don't want any one else getting caught up in that tornado."

"It hardly seems fair-"

"Nothing about this world, the next, all others, all existence in general is _fair_ , Humilitas." Patientia was glum, but that was to be expected. None of them could even begin to fathom the enormity, the terror that was to be her imminent future. "It just is. Whether it is fair or not is just an unreasonable and inconsequential construct of a situation that must simply _be_." She passed once more trembling fingers back through her thick hair, carving trails along her scalp. "As the humans would say, it is my cross to bear. I can at least bear it gracefully."

Humilitas offered a venerate smile, for it was what little they could do and put a hand to his fellow Virtue's narrow shoulder. "May I at least purchase you a libation before your departure?"

She returned the smile gratefully. "I rather think I'll be needing a bottle of 'libation' at this point. But yes. Thank you. No one said being graceful was mutually exclusive to being sober."

The very odd group made their way to the airport bar, Superbia in the lead as the others all distributed his exorbitant amount of belongings between them. Humilitas ended up ordering all their drinks; Superbia, of course, had no intention of paying and Acedia didn't have a pound to their name.

"who do we know who's arrived so far?" Acedia inquired, Gameboy balanced against the lip of the bar as they slugged back intermediate glugs from their beer.

Patientia held up a hand, bending back each of her lovely fingers as she rounded off. "Luxuria, Castitas, Gula, Temperantia, Humanitas. Though I can't imagine Invidia would be far behind."

"Still as revolting as ever? The old pair of love birds?" Superbia asked, sipping on his neat three fingers of _16 year old Lagavulin_ scotch whiskey. Humilitas, taking exception to their appraisal, unscrewed the cap from his two pound bottle of orange juice and took a careful nip from the over pulpy contents.

"You could learn a thing or two about being revolting from that ‘old pair of love birds’ _Su-tan_." The slightest note of passive bitterness marred his tone.

Superbia gave a vainglorious horse like snort; clearly sensitive to his second halves feelings. "Oh, please. You know full well what you mean to me. I fail to see how you require reminding of it every five minutes just to be secure in it. It comes from a deeper place." He did nothing so far in the means of physically reaffirming this however, but simply returned to his drink with the obstinacy he believed was intrinsic of the enlightened. "What point is there in parading it about for the uncaring inspection of gormless humans?"

"It's hardly about 'parading it about' for the sake of showing off to humans." Humilitas said, though quietly feeling as though an open demonstration of affection would go strides towards making him feel somewhat the more appreciated. Was it not enough that he professed not so much as a 'boo' to Superbia, roaming the globe, slipping it to whatever humans what might so happen to cross his path? "There is simply something to be said for being 'expressive' on occasion."

"You express _more_ than enough for the both of us, I think it's safe to say." Superbia stated, reaching over without looking to pat the back of Humilitas's hand in a manner what was not so much affectionate as it was patronizing. "And don't think for a minute that I don't know where all this current malaise truly stems from. You're just bent out of shape because you don't want this _precious little butterball_ of a world to end."

"I have a lot invested in it." Humilitas said, quietly. Their subtly sulky tone was enough to incite Superbia into smacking his glass down onto the bar top and actually turning to look properly at his counterpart. Which was rather the demonstrative act of acknowledgment on his part.

"Don't even _start_ on at me about investments. What would _you_ know about investments? I've got investments all the way up the yin yang!" He turned away with a sullen huff, tipping more of the expensive liquor over his filler plumped lips. Liquor which would, in less than a year now, serve as precious little asides from a fond memory. "Think it's easy, overseeing six separate multi-conglomerate billion dollar organisations?"

"and here comes the bragging..." Acedia remarked, still resolutely focused on their game. The others for the most part ignored the comment.

"I can't imagine you would want to see everything brought to an end any more than I do." Humilitas continued with the point he had been attempting to make on the plane ride over. Before Superbia had rerouted their plans in the systematic removal of their clothing. "You take pride in the work that you've done. You really want to see all that effort reduced to naught? All that time, all that money. You won't be so affluent back There, you know. Nor so important."

This was one that naturally hit Superbia hard. Any world in which he could not feature pride of place was naturally a sore point.

"Well of course it's disappointing," He said, convincing no one with his would be 'uncaring' tone. "But what use is there in crying about it?"

"The point is we don't _have_ to just cry about it."

Superbia lifted a finger from the side of his glass and pointed it reproachfully at Humilitas's innocent face. "Don't you start in on this again."

"On what again?" Patientia asked, naturally confused. She of course had not been in attendance during the 'pillow talk' portion of their plane trip. Talk which Superbia had all but smothered out of existence by means of anything short of an actual pillow.

"Nonsense talk, that's what. Too much time spent with the sad humans of the down and out set." The Capital Vice of Pride made ever so much a display out of dropping his bottom lip and rubbing a knuckle into the corner of his eye mockingly. "Starting to believe his own bullshit about shooting high and seizing the day. World is your oyster and all that pish."

"We don't have to go through with it, you know." Humilitas softly, yet tenaciously repeated. Superbia responded by leaning back so dramatically on their bar stool that they nearly flipped themselves designer arse over tit. Groaning his disgust towards the looming, girder wreathed ceiling above.

"And he's going there..."

"We could refuse. Put up a fight."

"'Put up a fight', _listen_ to yourself!" Superbia put their glass down, and leaned close to their counterpart. There was something flatteringly desperate about his energy; some of that arrogance sheared through to pave the path for genuine, not-oft demonstrated, concern. "Put up a fight against who exactly? ...God? I can just see how that would go down. 'Oh, um... hey God. Listen, just thinking about this whole end of the world, malarkey. What say instead of instigating the end times we just... give it a miss? Keep beating this dead horse well beyond the point of it giving even the most infinitesimal of involuntary muscle spasms and just keep on with the keeping on, in spite of the fact that you are _clearly_ of the divine opinion that your considered to be greatest achievement is a big old universal blunder, on the mere grounds that I, a lowly underling, have a vested interest in this particular dead horse?"" He thrust a hand down through the air, emulating a lightening strike. "BOOM! Royally smited. All she wrote." He shook his head, retrieving his drink and taking a much deeper gulp from the contents than he might usually have done. This was what Humilitas drove them to, with all their questioning. "Do you even _think_ about anyone else besides yourself? Where do you suppose that would leave _me_? Doomed to an eternity without my better half, that's where! And you _know_ how well that shit plays out!"

"Yes." Patientia said, bitterly. "I think we _all_ know."

They were silent a while. A silence in which Superbia might indeed have felt embarrassed for their insensitivity, if shame was a prescient component of their being.

"We apologize." Humilitas offered, at length. Superbia's slight was, by nature of their bound, his slight by direct association. And it was he what had started this unfortunate train of conversation, anyhow. "He didn't mean it."

"besides... separation is entirely different to one half actually being snuffed out of existence, eh?" Acedia contributed, eyes still locked on their gaming device, playing one handed as they lifted their beer bottle and swigged from the hoppy contents. "i'm not entirely sure any of us could survive if our secondary died. probably just turn to ash and drift away on the wind."

"...Well there's a cheery thought." Superbia said and with such an even inflection that it roused a grateful chortle out of the others. "Way to go and lift the mood as always, Sloth."

Acedia surprised them all then, by hitting the pause button and dropping the Gameboy down inelegantly upon the countertop. They turned and looked at them properly for the first time since they had all converged in the Arrival's lounge. Their entire visage might have resonated with the suggestion of compromised health, poor sleep hygiene and disordered living but one look at those ageless eyes, of a red that no human eye could ever possess and they were reminded that this was a creature just as profligate and as autocratic as they themselves.

"sorry to be the realist in this _scheißhaus_ situation, but there's not a great deal we _can_ do." They advised, reaching grubby fingers into a bag of crisps Humilitas had purchased and shoving a messy handful into their mouth. Splinters broke free as they continued to talk and chew at the same time. "great plans are bigger than _our_ plans, after all..."

"Plans, _what_ plans?!" Superbia exclaimed, exasperated. "You never have _plans_!"

"...there were some video games coming out that I was moderately excited for. release dates now post... end of the world and all that." They sighed forlornly, a speck of chip burrowed cosily into the cracked corner of their mouth. "t _he dread wolf rises_ seems all too satirical, given what's coming..."

"It's not as though we haven't had time in which to get ourselves accustomed to the concept." Patientia reminded them, placing the rim of her glass daintily against her lips and drawing back on the fortified wine. Why she had gone and chosen a slow sipping beverage, she wasn't entirely sure. Shots of pure absinth seemed more in the realm of what she currently required. "One way or another, we knew the end was coming."

"Concurred." Humilitas had taken to plucking at the label of his orange juice. "I was just... rather sort of hoping that it wouldn't have to be _us_ in charge of instigating that particular 'other'. You would think one anti-Christ and Four Horseman charged specifically with carrying out would be apocalypses would be more than enough."

"They had ONE job." Superbia contributed and it gratified Humilitas slightly to garner his secondary's 'somewhat support' on the subject. "How'd it all go and get so messed up?"

Acedia had started to snigger, looking far too pleased with themselves. This naturally ticked Superbia off all the more; for Acedia was the Vice with which he had the least in common and had ostensibly limited rapport with. They had always taken far too much delight in unsettling Superbia and being undermined was naturally something that Pride had little means of dealing with appropriately.

"Why are you snickering?" He snapped, thinking it a very strange thing for someone who was landed in the same metaphorical boat as the rest of them.

"just... imagining the look on your face about a minute from now." Acedia laughed, slapping their knee. It was by far the most animated the others had seen them in some time. "oh... you are going to love this! and by love, i mean hate. like, a _lot_."

"What are you prattling on about?"

"remember old mate from the garden?" Acedia said, with a sly, anticipatory look. And, because Superbia continued to stare at them in a daft, uncomprehending manner, added: "of eden?"

Superbia cast their mind back. It was easier for Vices and Virtues than it was for even Angel's and Demon's. They were ages older than both and had memories what projected back much further than this still. Six thousand years was much like shooting slow moving fish in a barrel of treacle.

"That obnoxious ginger bellend?" He paused, putting the pieces together and his mouth dropped. "NO."

"see, _there it is!_ " Acedia crowed, pointing unappreciatively at Superbia's stunned, guppy like expression. "didn't I tell you he would pull that face?!"

"Are you telling me," Superbia hissed, half suspecting that this was all simply a ploy by Acedia to rile him up, before remembering that this was far too much effort for a Vice whose principle _raison d'etre_ was laziness. "That that silver tongued gimboid what went and fucked up our primary retirement, went ahead and fucked up the apocalypse too?!"

"Not just him." Patientia said, unsurprised that Superbia hadn't bothered to sit down and read the documentation what had been forwarded to each of them by the likely unwilling representatives of Heaven. "Reports indicate that the angel of the Eastern Gate was also involved. Handful of humans. The Anti-Christ exercising autonomy, all what went hand in hand with the chomping of the apple and all that."

"i wanted to put the tree on the moon but _nobody_ listens to me..." Acedia muttered, kicking back in their seat and picking up their Gameboy once more. Humilitas gave them a prudent, admonishing look, which the Vice naturally failed to appreciate, given that they were once more absorbed in their digital dalliances.

"That nobody is _God_. Whatever the reason, she wanted to test the will of humans and their capacity to abide. No one properly factored in what some disgruntled demons were capable of perpetuating."

"well, it's hardly rocket science, is it?" Acedia pointed a finger out over the bar top, as though remonstrating towards something in the distance. "hey. naked human lady. see that tree? those apples won't kill you, they'll make you totes smarter. why not go and take a bite? yolo." They turned back to their gaming device with a disinterested sniff. "you all give the demon far too much credit."

"Rather like to do _more_ than give the bug eyed little cockjaw credit. Smarmy faced git has been dogging my bootheels all eternity." Superbia slurped from his drink vehemently.

It was true that all throughout the long length of human history, the demon Crowley had often managed to unintentionally (though rather sometimes intentionally) impede, interject or directly steal ideas and concepts what Superbia might otherwise have flouted for themselves. Tumblr was still a bitter topic, so far as things went. Never mind selfies. That one had really stung.

"I tell you," Pronounced the Capital Vice of Pride, whose eyes had taken on a rather strange, auroral glow. "This will all be worth it so long as I have the opportunity to smite that smarmy little bottom feeder. Grind those filth hugging coils of his right on through to the centre of the earth while it breaks apart."

He brought the glass down sharply against the counter top. Superbia's anger was an old one and it left long, splintering cracks through the plains of the wood fired glass.

Cracks what he would see, and preferably sooner rather than later, rendered through diabolic bone.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yes, the lack of capitilization in Acedia's speech is intentional. They are too lazy to use capitals when speaking ;)
> 
> Also, in case it wasn't obvious, Superbia's belief in Caucasian males being the epitome of power is his affected point of view and not my own. He choses forms what he believes represent the most power, and after witnessing what white males have done throughout history, aligns himself to their perceived to be 'dominant nature'.


	31. Or, in which Crowley and the Archangel's have a lovely time together.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And then the thoughts became the expected mush what swirled about in the interchangeable soup that was the demon's brain, precious little existing besides the lips against his own, the pressure of the hands laying waste to the foundations of his hips and the feeling that there needed to be much more of these very things and much less clothing in which to get in the way of said things.
> 
> Off in the distance came the sound of a mail slot, long in need of hinge based lubrication, easing open. And a voice, a voice what made them both freeze in their impassioned movements, calling out in a cadence strong enough to clear the awning space within the adjacent rooms.
> 
> "If you're closed, you might try turning the sign around to say as much. Word to the wise."
> 
> Crowley's eyes widened to such a degree that he felt the contacts shift from beneath the lids.
> 
> "That's Michael." He hissed, coldness steeling out through the heat he had only moments earlier been the very much enjoying...

**~X~**

* * *

_**Saturday - 13th of April: 10:49am** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's...** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

As you may well have gathered by now, Aziraphale and Crowley had been around for quite some time.

They had beheld the passing of any number of humans during their six thousand years on earth. Never before had they attended a funeral for one. Not at least, in any sort of official capacity.

They had purchased new suits for the quote unquote 'occasion'. Once upon a time, Crowley might simply have snapped his fingers and miracled the suit into existence but they were being careful with their powers these days.

It was something of a new experience, going along with Aziraphale for a fitting and permitting some rather oafish gentleman to tug and tuck and pin the clothing were deemed appropriate. Crowley had given him a very severe look the entire time; feeling that clothing attendants were not so far removed from service people. The man had actually been holding a measuring tape to the inside seam of his trouser leg at one point. Aziraphale had not seemed to think such an intimate gesture was any cause for alarm and simply given Crowley's panicked visual cry for help a supportive smile.

Aziraphale in turn rather fancied himself to have been a very good sport about the entire situation. In his time, he had presented for any number of suit fittings and always required numerous letting out's or taking in's or trouser hemming's. The attendant had all but fawned on Crowley's tall, slender form, exclaiming that any of the suits they had would likely 'fit him like a hand fits a glove'. It was hard, even for an angel, not to take it a little personally.

Flash forward then to Saturday morning. Aziraphale, having dressed in his third times over redacted suit a good ten minutes prior, was currently dawdling about in the study area of his shop, waiting on Crowley. The demon was rather taking his time with getting ready. The angel, aware that an over saturation of preening was not typical so far as Crowley was concerned (appearances being largely deceptive on this part) determined that it was high time to check in on his progress.

"How are you traveling, dear?" He asked, tapping the knuckle of his index finger lightly against the bedroom door. It had swung the mostly shut at some juncture and Aziraphale pushed it open to find Crowley leaning dramatically over the vanity, left eyelid pried apart just about as far as it could likely go. And that was wide enough mind you, to swallow the entirety of his head and have enough left over to nibble on his neck.

He was dressed to the exception of his suit jacket; white shirt tucked into black, high waisted trousers what had required nothing in the way of hemming or hawing. He was using the mirror as a guide by which to awkwardly insert contact lenses. He was never able to wear them for the most part; his eyes being approximately three and a half millimetres wider than even the largest of human eyes and no contacts were designed at such a diameter so as to sit comfortably.

But these had been specially ordered some years earlier and could do the job so long as said job was only a very short stint. Crowley found them extraordinarily uncomfortable, somewhat painful and tended to blink a lot more when wearing them than what he was naturally accustomed.

Diabolic magic could do a lot of things. But it could not alter, nor veil the marks of damnation. In Crowley, this took form in the brand of the snake to the side of his face and the large yellow eyes with their black split down the middle. The contacts could change the colour, but Crowley still had to do his part in controlling his nerves, so as to keep the pupil and iris looking as small and as human like as possible.

Aziraphale took note of this but then his eyes slipped away to appraise other the more appealing factors. He was unable to recall the last time Crowley had worn a suit and in spite of the circumstances under which he was required to do so, could not deny how wonderfully dapper the demon looked in it.

The cut of the shirt in particular, the way in which it was so neatly tucked into the back of the trousers emphasized Crowley's narrow waist and hips perfectly. The high cut further offset and accentuated the length of his legs, whilst flattering the curve of his bottom.

"Oh, you're wearing your... contacts today." Aziraphale remarked, having paused to swallow. He was very glad that he had applied clinical antiperspirant before dressing; otherwise he was certain he might have been set to sweating at his observations of Crowley's figure.

The demon grunted, eyes pitched up high in his sockets as he adjusted the left contact. They rendered his irises a shade of light green, which seemed to Aziraphale a somehow colder colour than that of his natural eyes.

"Thought rocking up to a funeral in sunglasses might be considered just a _touch_ disrespectful." He growled, blinking rapidly as the contact finally settled into place. "Hate these bloody things... they're so fiddly." He glanced over now, eyes still narrowed as he adjusted to the contacts and gave a small, uncomfortable looking smile. "You look good."

Aziraphale tittered softly as he glanced his hand over the front of his suit. "Thank you. I must admit, it's been a while since I've worn a tie." He watched as Crowley picked up a pair of cufflinks, circular replicants of the symbol ouroboros and fed one through the node in his shirtsleeve. "And look at you all decked out in your best bib and tucker."

"Bib and tucker..." Crowley gave a soft snort of laughter. "Just when I thought you couldn't go and get more English."

Aziraphale drifted on over to stand behind Crowley, reaching around to cinch up the top button of his shirt (to which Crowley gave an annoyed growl) and then to straighten the knot in his tie. He may have looked every bit as handsome as he always did, but it was these small touches what made the austerity of the ensemble come together properly.

"Well... I'm _not_ actually English, am I?" He reminded the demon, who gave a throaty chuckle as he succeeded with affixing one of the cufflinks and set to work on the other.

"You do a very good impression." He said, which was a wondrous understatement. Though Heaven was of course not located in England, Aziraphale had retained the very same accent he always had; even when speaking the Universal language in the times before human kind had developed their own unique branching subsets.

The accent was, as it had always been, simply one of the many what had been developed in Heaven and had been integrated into the human race as a direct result of Aziraphale's installation on Earth. It was perhaps more appropriate to say that all English people did in fact do a very good impression of Aziraphale, rather than the other way around.

Having righted Crowley's tie, Aziraphale happened upon a protruding edge of shirttail the demon had not entirely succeeded in tucking into his trousers. The angel took it upon himself to amend this; using his fingertips to jab the shirt down below the hem of the demon's pants; a process which Crowley did little besides quirk a brow at before then shrugging off and continuing with what he was doing.

It was ever so typically Aziraphale to fuss. What wasn't so typical, was the then feeling of the angel's hands sliding slowly and then, with decidedly more direct intent, in around Crowley's hips. Both the demon's brows went up at this and he paused in his efforts of wiggling the cufflink into place.

"What are you up to, angel?" He asked, glancing into the mirror and seeing that Aziraphale's eyes were focused on the exact space that his hands now occupied. _Oh._

"Just... trying something." The angel murmured, focused very intensely on the feelings of tenderness, pride and arousal he was experiencing. Projecting the entirety of his attention into this, so as to hopefully block out the aggressive failsafe's. A little experiment, to see whether there was some other ways around it. And so far, so good. "... Do you mind?"

Crowley tried very hard to play it cool. He was quickly learning that getting one's hopes up was often times a recipe for disappointment. Aziraphale's celestial barbs were cruel and painful and had taken lately to striking with indiscriminate volition. He wanted desperately to support the angel with learning how to build a tolerance against them but it seemed about as reasonable as shrugging off a knife blade being stabbed through the centre of your hand.

"No. Try away." He replied nonetheless, fumbling the cufflink as Aziraphale trailed his hands up the sides of his waist and around so as to cup to his hips.

They were lovely hips, Aziraphale thought. So slender. And yet the sharp sway of Crowley's lower back lent a supple sensuality to his profile, such that he could hardly be accused of being too lean or too thin. Aziraphale thought back to the Thursday night just past; Crowley climbing up out of the bath tub. He could see how the contours of that lovely body paid homage to the clothes now draped upon it.

He pressed a kiss to the side of Crowley's face, taking another squeeze of his hips as he did. No pain. Not yet, anyway.

"I'm so proud of you, my dear. You've done so well." He placed his lips to the cursed marking of the snake and then down, to capture a portion of his neck what the shirt collar didn't hide. His breaths had thickened considerably. Crowley's eyes, he saw, fluctuated from open to shut at the touch of his mouth. "And might I say ...high waisted trousers look _ever_ so fetching on you..."

"This your idea of seducing me?" The demon said, with a strangled chuckle. Aziraphale's lips were in under the lobe of his ear now and the hair on the back of his neck had started standing to attention. Among... other things. "You sure pick and choose your moments, don't you?"

Aziraphale registered a flush of shame, realizing that of course the timing had been hardly optimal. They were supposed to have been getting ready to head out to a funeral. The funeral of one of Crowley's clients. Someone whom he had professed to caring a great deal for.

"Oh, I... I _do_ apologize." He said, taking a step back and bringing his hands away from Crowley's body. "How dreadfully inappropriate of me."

"I don't remember saying stop." Crowley murmured, his contact veiled eyes appearing to glow just as brightly as ever. It seemed as clear an invitation as any, for the angel to once more eradicate the distance between them, sliding his fingers across the plain of Crowley's cheek. He guided his lips down against his own, their tongues set to ever so tentative at first but all too muchly needed work.

As Crowley turned in his hold, Aziraphale dropped his hands to about the demons waist and hips, caressing with ever so subtle increases of possessive, passionate pressure. Crowley twined one arm about Aziraphale's shoulders, the other hand set to tangling in the curls of his white hair.

 _A proper kiss_ , Crowley thought to himself, running the risk of pulling himself in tighter against Aziraphale's more than accommodating body. Felt the angels hands squeeze, rub up and down the length of his back. The soft murmurs passing between the parting of their lips. _One he hasn't pulled away from._

One which did indeed seem to be getting deeper by the moment. The pressure of Aziraphale's body and the energy what passed between them, gave rise to the fleeting thought in Crowley's head of backing himself either onto the dresser or over towards the bed. The very thought was enough to send bells to ringing in his mind.

_The backs of his knees hitting the edge of the mattress, Aziraphale slowly lowering him down, laying then on top of him. Continued kisses, nips and nudging of tongues; Crowley's leg twining up around Aziraphale's waist, draping over his own backside, using the grip to pull him further flush against his own body..._

They only had about twenty minutes before they needed to leave. And doing such a thing would more the likely leave their clothes messy and dishevelled but neither of them seemed to particularly care at that point. They sank into one another as completely as rain water in the bonds of the greater ocean; absorbed entirely by the energy of their kiss.

Interrupted not by Aziraphale's belligerent angelic failsafe's this time but by a loud, punitive sounding knock from the front door of the shop.

Crowley tilted his head back, snarling his displeasure towards the ceiling. If it wasn't one thing, it was another. But Aziraphale rather surprised him, by not in fact spinning on his heel and swanning compliantly out to answer the summons of whatever impertinent person (more than likely a would be customer of the 'Discreet' bookstore located just around the corner of his own business) but in turning just enough so as to bellow out a strongly advised _'We're closed!'_ over his shoulder before returning his attentions to Crowley with considerably more vested interest.

 _Well, bugger me,_ the demon thought, feeling the press of the vanity unit align to his rump as Aziraphale bore him up against it. _He's really going for it. Who woulda thunk it?_

And then the thoughts became the expected mush what swirled about in the interchangeable soup that was the demon's brain, precious little existing besides the lips against his own, the pressure of the hands laying waste to the foundations of his hips and the feeling that there needed to be much more of these very things and much less clothing in which to get in the way of said things.

Off in the distance came the sound of a mail slot, long in need of hinge based lubrication, easing open. And a voice, a voice what made them both freeze in their impassioned movements, calling out in a cadence strong enough to clear the awning space within the adjacent rooms.

"If you're closed, you might try turning the sign around to say as much. Word to the wise."

Crowley's eyes widened to such a degree that he felt the contacts shift from beneath the lids.

" _That's Michael_." He hissed, coldness steeling out through the heat he had only moments earlier been the very much enjoying. It had been a very long time since he had heard the Archangel's voice, let alone set eyes on them but the fear was just as tangible as it had ever been.

Michael was the overseer and coordinator of the Heaven based militia. As the left hand of God, they were both the righteous sword and the shroud of shadow through which the wrath of the Lord and most of the underhanded dealings were conducted.

When Crowley himself had been an angel, he had been designated the class of Architect; the group which more often than not locked horns with the military, on the basis of their taking creative chances and often freedom of license with which to next develop whatever project Heaven had assigned to them. The military had a certain means of how things ought to be done and anything considered to have stepped outside of these stringent measures was quickly and often punitively dealt with.

Aziraphale understood this all too well. He was a former designate of the military, after all. He'd had his fair share of involvement in either the shutting down or confiscating of certain plans or works in progress. It had never been a task with which he took any sort of pleasure. And he was rather convinced these days that it may very well have been such acts of subjugation which had spurred what Gabriel himself had once referred to as ' _The artsy liberal nerds'_ of Heaven to take arms with Lucifer and rebel. A lot of very sour feelings came part and parcel with grinding brilliant minds into the dirt for too long.

" _What the hell are_ they _doing here?!_ " Aziraphale whispered back, removing his hands reluctantly from about Crowley's midsection. The barbs had not sought to make their presence known on this occasion, which did in turn make the interruption of his former superior all the more resented.

" _I don't know!_ " Crowley hissed, feeling for the first time in many a thousand years that once historic instinct to revert to his serpentine form and slither out of sight beneath the shadows of the bed. Michael was, as they had always been, a scary one. _"What I do know is that they're a Heaven of a lot more difficult to deal with than Gabriel. Some cheek, though. After you went and told them not to come to the shop again."_

 _"Quite right."_ Aziraphale sighed, ran a hand back through his now mussed head of hair before casting both palms up to either side of his flushed face. What nerves he may have once entertained, vanquished in the annoyance what currently held pride of place in his body. "I've had enough of this. I'm going to go and speak with them. You wait here."

Crowley scoffed, easing himself up off of the vanity and doing his very best to pretend as though his fingers had not taken to trembling. "Yeah. Because _that's_ happening."

"I can handle this!" Aziraphale snapped, sounding pretty damned firm about it too.

"Whether you can handle this or not isn't the point! They need to know we've got each others backs. You're not going out there alone and that's all there is to it." Crowley straightened his tie, for what good this meagre adjustment did and set his back teeth hard into the confines of one another. Stiff... lower lip, and all that. "Suck it up."

Knowing full well that arguing the rub with Crowley was as pointless as a hula hoop, Aziraphale relented. "Fine." He said, straightening his suit jacket and then pointing a cautionary finger all but up the demon's nose. Crowley resented him a little for the fact that said finger was doing nothing in the way of nervous spasming . "But let _me_ do the talking. No sense in just... pissing them off the further."

 _Pissing them off the further?_ Crowley thought, left brow peaking into the lines of his forehead as he followed Aziraphale's unexpectedly stout and confident stride out of the bedroom. _That's the second swear word I've heard him say in this last week alone. Seems like someone's breaking all manner of celestial glass ceilings._

It was a strange thing but it gave Crowley all the more hope that with other such exceptions to the rules he had long since lived by, that Aziraphale would continue pushing against those other erstwhile barriers with the same conviction. _Certainly seems to be working so far,_ he thought, smiling as he dabbed his thumb against a wet patch set astride the corner of his lip.

The shutters were drawn over the glass of the front doors, inhibiting the view of the street beyond them. Aziraphale once more impressed Crowley (quite as much as concerned him) by not dilly-dallying with the semantics and gave a resolute flick of the lock and hauled open the right hand door as though fully intending to knock the person beyond it clear onto their arse. Perhaps he had been, who can say? He was a bit of an unknown element, these days.

Crowley mirrored this, if but a second belayed, by pushing open the left door and moving to stand flush to Aziraphale's shoulder; trying his very best to look suitably tall, glareful and imposing. Michael and Uriel had clearly learned from the mistakes of their colleagues and were standing well out of swinging distance; offside of the main entryway.

Though both were renowned for being of a venerate and composed disposition, they did in fact give themselves over to a slight feeling of surprise to see Crowley standing there; who leered out of the doorway like a hungry Rottweiler on the business end of a choke chain. Though in Crowley's case, it might have made more sense to compare him with an irritable Pekinese, but the risk of harm was about as equally likely.

"Greetings, Aziraphale." Michael said, in the very prim and proper tone what might have been expected of a formal representative of Heaven. They added, somewhat more the stiffly: "Demon Crowley."

When posing as Crowley, Aziraphale treated himself to having rather the fun at not only the expense of Hell's council but with Michael themselves. Michael had provided the Holy Water what was intended to have destroyed Crowley and had been more than a little taken aback to have returned to collect the Holy remnant and found instead a very self-satisfied demon wallowing about in a bathtub, merrily splashing away and going to no particular efforts to atomize.

Aziraphale had made Michael miracle him a towel before very firmly advising the collective that he (AKA: Crowley) was to be left to his own devices in future. The insinuation being that he was granting them a kindness in not swinging his stringy body up out of the bath and delivering a veritable whoop-arse of cleverly concealed demonic vitriol what would leave them all choking on those parts of their bodies which might usually be located on the _inside_ of their bodies.

It had made rather the impression on someone even as staunch and as supposedly fearless as Michael. It made no sense, after all, for a demon to have subverted the very essence of their nature, such as this. Who knew then, what else he might be capable of?

If Crowley had been yet aware of the impact Aziraphale had made on his once superior, he himself might have felt a little more confident going in. Not that it mattered now. The demon had a wealth of experience so far as reading body language and facial expressions was concerned. Michael's might have been more subtle than the demonstrative examples set forth by the human race, but he could see it instantly for what it was.

The Archangel was on the back foot. Their forearms had ever so slightly tensed. They were _concerned_ by his being there and that made him feel a great deal more in charge of the situation than he might otherwise have done.

"Archangel Michael. Long time, no see." He effaced an exterior of smug boredom, lifting his chin in meagre acknowledgement of the angel's presence. "Uriel. Still looking glum, as usual."

"I'm interacting with you. Of course it stands to reason that I would look glum." Uriel stated, rather quick off the mark. They had not been present at the scene of "Crowley's" intended execution. Word of mouth made them cautious, but fear did not so effectively translate.

"Careful. Almost made a joke out of that." Crowley said, to which Uriel, expression as incalculable as ever, merely stared back unappreciatively. If anyone in all the known universe might have had a chance of besting Crowley in a staring competition, Uriel would be a strong contender. The demon rather fancied that he did in fact blink far the more regularly and his were eyes what required little in the means of lubrication.

"Just what is it that you all want from me?" Aziraphale asked, his voice firm, level and not at all what the Archangel's would have expected of him. But then, Uriel had personally witnessed the supposedly congenial spit Hell fire halfway across a room and that was not a sight you went and dismissed out of hand. "I thought I made it perfectly clear to Gabriel and Sandalphon that if they wished to talk they were to go the effort of phoning me so as to set up a time to meet!"

"Knocking isn't phoning." Crowley somewhat pointlessly added, making a knocking gesture against the door before then holding his finger and thumb up to his ear to replicate a telephone. "Knock, knock. Bring-bring. See the difference?"

Michael flashed him a look what might have withered the otherwise more stoutly of house plants.

"They have _tried_ calling. _You_ haven't been answering."

"Ah..." Aziraphale said, thrown for just a moment before then realizing that he had perfectly valid and, more to the point, entirely honest reasons as to not having taken the calls. "Well... I haven't been home much these past couple of days. Been making a lot of phone calls of my own when I have been."

These calls had of course been in preparation for Gretchen's funeral and much of his time had otherwise been spent bussing or being chauffeured about by Crowley from business to business; selecting flowers, arranging catering for the reception, printing service pamphlets and after one particularly long and gruelling day, spending an hour at _Crockett & Jones_ so that Crowley could try on shoes before then whisking him off for a visit to Aziraphale's manicurist. It hadn't been an absolute necessity, but Crowley had been particularly glum since Gretchen's passing and Aziraphale did not think it entirely out of sorts so as to spoil him.

He hadn't quite been expecting to spoil him in the approximate range of three thousand pounds for two pairs of shoes that he might otherwise have miracled into existence, but Crowley had managed to somehow justify the expenditure with a very lovely smile and a proud, peacock-esque strut as he walked the shoes out of the shop and back to the car. He had been opposed to Aziraphale paying _('Still not a kept demon, angel')_ but was persuaded into feeling as though he would have been ungracious if he had outright refused the angel's offer. Aziraphale suspected he did not feel nearly quite so guilty as he might otherwise have pretended to be and rather thought he had taken to being pampered.

"Would you _not?"_ Uriel suddenly exclaimed, causing Aziraphale to jump a little and further sallow his already pervasive feelings of barely tolerated annoyance. It took him a moment to even figure out just what Uriel was taking exception to and realized that the demand had been directed at Crowley.

"Would he not, _what?"_

"Would he not _stare_ at me, as such!" Uriel said, narrowing her own eyes as Crowley continued glaring at her with all the warmth of an ice mummies vaginal cavity. "It feels as though he's boring a hole right through the centre of my face."

"If only it were that easy." Crowley mumbled, thinking to himself that Uriel's protestations were not so much out of her perceived annoyance with his staring, but sour grapes over the fact that he was winning their unspoken exchange. It was such a pointless interlude that even Aziraphale could not pretend to pay it any mind and he simply turned back to Michael with a small sigh, leaving Uriel and Crowley to battle it out.

"So, I am assuming that you are here to follow up in place of Gabriel's untimely failure to do so?" Said the Principality, taking no responsibility in his part in not having picked up the phone in the first place.

"We would not have sought to bother you otherwise, Aziraphale. Believe me, if circumstances were not so dire as they were, we would be more then content to leave you to your own devices." Uriel curled her lip, casting a glance back towards Crowley who appeared more the pleased for his having been the winner in their aphonic exchange. "Such as they are."

Crowley gave a sharp hiss, not at all appreciating being referred to as a 'device'. It was little better than being assessed as a 'glorious tool'.

"I'm going to assume that whatever business it is that you wish to discuss with me, is much the same as what Hell wishes to discuss with Crowley?" Aziraphale said, giving the demon a few good staunch pats on the back which just about ratcheted the jellied discs out from between the nodes of Crowley's spine.

"It is."

Aziraphale sighed, glancing at Crowley who took a break from sizing Uriel up. They shared, as they so often did, an unspoken agreement.

 _Better to get it done and out of the way,_ Aziraphale intoned.

To which Crowley replied, _Too right. If they go and interrupt any more would-be intimate moments I'm going to bend their haloes in half and jam them where even the light of the Almighty don't shine. Also, we need to take an umbrella along today. Storm coming, you know. Nothing in tartan._

"Very well." Aziraphale said, ignoring the last silent impeachment from Crowley which seemed to suggest he wanted to sniff the lavender bags in his underwear drawer, or something equally as ridiculous. "Better off being done with it." And then, because Michael and Uriel looked to have every intention of moving closer to the doors, jabbed a reproachful finger in their direction. "Uh-uh! I'll not have you make yourselves comfortable, thank you! I haven't the time to speak to you right now; we have prior arrangements. You shall wait right there and I will fetch my diary and we shall set a time in which to meet."

" _I want you so_ bad _right now_..." Crowley breathed into his ear, earning an embarrassed (somewhat still the flattered however) 'hush' from the angel.

"Just one moment." Aziraphale turned and retreated back into the interior of the shop. Crowley, still staring at the archangels with a sort of intensity you could well equate with the sensation of sucking on a spoonful of powdered mustard, slunk out into the street, disdainful as a Siamese cat what was having to wait too long for its supper, and sloped to a distance of approximately eight or so feet away. He took a quick glance towards the door of the shop, before, with a snap of his fingers, materializing a cigarette. (If one looked closely enough, they would see that the tiny letters what might otherwise have been numbers near the edge of the filter, read _Janthony's_ ).

Crowley brought the cigarette neatly up to perch between his pouted lips, lighting the tip with another light flick off of the nail of his index finger. He stood there, smoking indolently, casting imperious glances the Archangel's way before then flicking ash off towards the curb in a somehow purposefully theatrical manner. As though the mere presence of the angel's was too terrible a burden on the time of a creature quite so important as him.

He succeeded in making both Michael and Uriel feel very uncomfortable. They likely would not have done; if they had been in an environment they were familiar with. But this was earth and they were the outsiders in this particular setting. Aziraphale and Crowley had had thousands of years in which to acclimate themselves. Michael and Uriel spent precious little time there, where they could afford it. They felt about as out of place as a hedgehog in a nudist colony. And just about as appreciated as a small, offensively spiky beggar might be received around bare, more the likely sunburned buttocks.

Michael, having transitioned between the somewhat more comforting pose of hands crossed in front of their body, to the then crook of their back, cleared their throat and made the decision to try to initiate conversation. It was the angelic thing to do, after all and if there was one thing an angel did enjoy (when they were permitted to do anything so self serving as experiencing _joy_ ) it was reminding others that they were in fact always the bigger person.

"So... how have you been?" They asked, to which they received rather the expectant snotty look from the officious demon in return.

"Fine..." Crowley drawled, easing back on the heels of his expensive new shoes so as to get a look in through a gap in the blinds on one of the side windows. Aziraphale must have not left his diary where he usually did, because it normally would not have taken so long to drift back.

All the better. Crowley would prefer he not catch him smoking. Quite as much, in fact, as he would have _enjoyed_ Aziraphale catching him smoking. It was tough some days, being in love with an angel. The demon in him wanted to subvert and malign, whilst the demon that was in love wanted to demonstrate respect and consideration. _Tough, tough, tough..._

"... Still a demon then?"

Crowley spluttered like an exsanguinating scuba diver whose mask had filled with water right on par with him developing the bends. He stared, wide eyed and flummoxed at Michael's genuinely curious expression.

"What is it _with_ you angels?! Is that like some sort of standard military interrogation question they force you all to learn up there in Heaven?! Newsflash; there's no antibiotic for damnation, you know!" He sighed, took a puff of his cigarette and shook his head with absolute disbelief. And then, unsatisfied that his tantrum had gotten the ludicrous nature of the point across, decided to drive it on home. "You know what? _No_. No, I'm _not_ still a demon. I'm currently undergoing a procedure to transition into a Bulgarian Mime artist. Any day now my face will start turning white and my personality will devolve into the effervescent equivalent of _Surströmming_."

Michael took this all in, barely a flicker passing through their carefully poised features. "Well... it seems to be going well." They said, having quite obviously missed the sarcasm.

Crowley rolled his eyes, painfully exasperated. It shouldn't have surprised him. It had taken Aziraphale so many thousand of years to master the nuance of something so dry as sarcasm; angels who barely bothered with the dipping of their ethereal big toes in the wading pool that was the earth, had no hope in Hell of ever being able to decipher it.

"And how about you guys? Still arseholes?" He said with a big, toothy histrionic grin that most would interpret as being insincere and rather the more fake as fuck. It would have fooled no one, let alone if the words preceding them had been in any way civil.

"I believe you mean _'angels'_." Michael said, in a concerted effort to maintain composure. Demons, they reminded themselves, were a caustic bunch. They couldn't help it, not really. It was the sulphur what made it impossible; what had burned out the parts of their souls what might otherwise have been capable of espousing self-control.

"Hey, you open that hole in your face and shit comes out. In my book, that's an arsehole."

Michael rolled their eyes back in their head, giving up whatever pretence they had been attempting to preserve. "Charming."

"Don't give me _'charming',_ you wanker." Crowley seethed. He was mad. Not only on account of having been interrupted just when things looked to be taking a good step forward with Aziraphale but for the archangels insistence with parlaying that ever-present self-righteous 'I am entitled to something' attitude what Crowley had always resented.

Not exclusively amongst angels, mind you, though they were ever so good at it. Anyone, who looked down their nose at others, who believed themselves to be in someway superior, pissed him the Heaven off. And though Michael did indeed frighten him, he decided to throw caution out the would be window and go ahead and say what it was he was thinking.

"You've got about as much charm," He said, "As an unsolicited dick pick that you receive in response to your opening line of 'Hi, how are you?' on an Internet dating app. With the foreskin grotesquely and unnecessarily peeled back like a blue heron wearing an ill-fitting turtleneck jumper. With just about the same looks, to boot."

Uriel rotated their body less than a half millimetre. Hands still folded, posture unchanged, but a threat lingering with some underlined substantiation in the air.

"I suggest you had watch your tongue, demon, or-"

"Or _what?"_ Crowley hissed, feeling a feisty, bitter edge lace to his tone as though a lemon had been voraciously squeezed into the very timbre of his voice. "Go ahead and try it. You take a swing at me and Aziraphale'll knock your block off."

He felt quite certain of it, too. Could almost see it, in fact and felt a weird, comforting warmth in his acknowledging that the person he loved was all the likely to step in to protect him. He had done it a number of times in the past but the most recent exchange with him plugging Sandalphon made Crowley feel so terribly proud and tickled and, honestly, rather turned on by Aziraphale's unexpected capacity to bail it up out of the far corner where required. That he in fact viewed Crowley as someone who was at times in need of that physical protection.

Which was a nice repayment for all those instances in which Crowley had in fact come to Aziraphale's rescue throughout the years of their relationship. Hardly hurt that the angel flex a bit of celestial muscle now that the circumstances of their relationship had shifted.

Whether Uriel might have had anything other planned than just a very stern finger waggling, was put on hold by Aziraphale emerging back out through the doors of the shop with his diary. He seemed to sense the increased levels of tension cast between the three gathered there and glanced between each of their faces as though this would be enough to reveal the underlying story.

"What on earth is going on?" He asked, which was a statement all too wonderfully appropriate for the situation. Crowley, thinking two things in that moment; (1.) That he was still smoking and (2.) That Uriel had sort of suggested that he shut up) went with what was most likely to draw the attention away from his own indecorous behaviour and turned it about so as to direct the energy back towards their agreed upon enemies.

"They threatened me." He tattled, sounding all too much like the kind of small, brown-nosing child who would go running to the on duty teacher at the first sign of someone stepping foot in the 'out-of-bounds' area. We all know the type.

"Did you threaten him?" Aziraphale asked, turning on the Archangels with an expression what said he was not predisposed to yanking open his diary and abrading the edges of the pages against their arms until they got a semi-decent papercut. Crowley stood beaming smarmily in the background, like a cat what knew they might have gotten a hiding if not for them having leapt to a high enough spot on top of a display cabinet.

"It was _not_ a threat." Uriel stated, experiencing a rather foreign sensation what most human beings would equate to as burgeoning frustration. This was an angel, however, whose blood pressure never so much as wavered in response to more understandingly stressful situations. Such as waylaid Apocalypse's or improperly filed paperwork. "He was running his mouth, which from what I recall was _not_ an unusual happenstance and we advised that he keep a civil tongue."

"Be that as it may, I hardly suppose you to be at all surprised that he is cross with you." Aziraphale said, ever as loyal in his response as the demon had so long wished for him to be. His nostrils hiked a moment and he turned, glancing at Crowley and waving a hand in his direction. "Crowley dear, can you please not smoke that close to the doorway?"

"Sorry, but I ain't going any further than this." Crowley replied, flicking a worm of ash out into a puddle on the curb before gesturing at the angels with the half expired dog end. "I'll end up round the corner and not be able to see what this lot are up to."

"Fine, but can you perhaps shift over to the right hand side of the shop? The wind is blowing in this direction."

"You're the boss." Crowley passed the cigarette over into his left hand, which he then extended out as far as his arm would go and sauntered on down the sidewalk, giving the angels a good glimpse of his bared front teeth as he went. Michael, he was pleased to see, gave him plenty of space, though this might have been their simply not wanting to share their imminent vicinity with a demon and their still lit cigarette.

Crowley didn't mind being asked to move. He was able to then install himself at the angel's backs, which likely succeeded in unnerving them further and anything what got up an Archangel's goat was all the better in Crowley's book.

He stood there, finishing his smoke and casting disapproving little looks into the backs of the celestial arseholes necks as they hunkered in around Aziraphale's diary as though it were a modest campfire on a bitter night. Aziraphale, Crowley noted with pride, seemed to be doing his very best to make the arrangements for a meeting as difficult as possible. The demon observed him purposefully flicking over a couple of days in which nothing the obvious had been planned and pretending as though these would not work for whatever the reason. He was very pleased to see that a lot of the set appointments ran to the likes of, _"Dinner w/ Crowley_ ", _"Wine bar w/ Crowley" "Drinks at Crowley's - Pick own movie"._ It appeared that a significant chunk of Aziraphale's future plans were dominated by Crowley inclusive activities. Which was a little co-dependent but heart-warming all the same.

After a few minutes of duelling date-books, Michael and Uriel cleared the screens of their celestial communications devices (referred to by the somewhat ostentatious name of Cele-phones) with a light breath of air and returned them to whichever pockets they originally dwelt and Aziraphale snapped briskly shut the halves of his red leather diary.

"Well, we shall see you then." Uriel said, with about as much excitement pertaining to the event as a randy adolescent might demonstrate when being hauled off for Saturday morning bible study. Crowley raised the hand currently not occupied with the pinching of the cigarette and snapped his fingers in the air.

"Oi. If this relates to me, could you be so kind as to pass along the details to my _darling_ ex-employers so we can get it all done in one hit?"

"A very good point." Aziraphale tapped his finger authoritatively against the cover of his diary, making certain he had his once superiors attentions. "Yes, if you could please arrange for the representatives of Hell to be in attendance at this meeting, also. I'm afraid it's quite out of the question that Crowley and I meet with you separately."

"We wouldn't dream of it." Michael said dryly, casting a rather sardonic looking smile over their shoulder at Crowley. "Not when the two of you are so _rarely_ out of shouting distance of one another."

"It's uncanny." Crowley mused thoughtfully. "How you so effortlessly maintain that resemblance to a dick. Never change, Michael. Never change."

Neither Archangel bothered to dignify this crude assessment with a response but merely swanned off back down the street with little more than an itinerant sniff. Crowley sauntered over to stand by Aziraphale's side, watching them as they went.

"Persistent bastards, I'll give 'em that." He mulled the possibilities over in his head a moment before leaning closer to share the one what was most concerning. _"Assassination attempt, you think?"_

"Hard to say. I wouldn't put anything past them." Aziraphale tucked his diary in under his arm, keeping his voice lowered for much the same reason as Crowley was. Which was no reason, at all. _"I've arranged for the meeting to take place in a public space. Make it harder for them to try anything."_

"Really suppose they would _care_ if it was public or not?"

"Angels are not about to risk collateral damage outside of it being a natural side effect of the apocalypse." Aziraphale said, though even he did not sound entirely convinced of the fact. "We're going to meet at _Basement Sate_. During happy hour."

Crowley wasn't quite sure what to think about this. He liked _Basement Sate_ , as did Aziraphale. It was a wonderful mesh of the two things they most enjoyed; creative alcoholic concoctions and desserts that were designed both delicately and decadently. It was a place Crowley would have much preferred to have returned to with Aziraphale as a sort of... well proper- _ish_ couple. If that's what they were.

The dim lighting, the leather seats, the soft music, the ambience... it wasn't altogether something what he wanted sullied by the presence of their deplorable former colleagues; all disapproving thin lips, malodorous stenches and swirling of flies and other assorted creepy crawlies. It seemed rather too much like rolling out a recently purchased antique rug, only to have the family dog come in and drag their worm riddled arse along the length of it.

"Oh. That should be _fun."_ He said, to which Aziraphale responded with a patient smile, knowing the demon's tone to be very much a contrast to what he was actually saying. "Hard enough to hear what's going on inside your own head, let alone what's coming out of one another's mouths."

"Best be prepared in advance." The angel paused a moment, appearing very conflicted. He almost didn't say it, such were his very strong feelings on the matter. And his very vocal denouncements concerning such things in the past. "I'd go so far as to chance acquiring some Holy water from a church... if I wasn't worried about you getting caught up in the midst of it."

"Might still be worth it. Just as a precaution, you know. Screw it up in another coffee cannister just as tight as that first time." Crowley chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip, all too painfully aware of what the demon's of Hell would have very much liked to have done to him, if given half a chance. Holy water seemed far the more merciful, in comparison. "Ironically enough, I'd feel safer if you had it on you."

"A shame as we can't bring Hell fire to the table. Little more the side of difficult to obtain."

"Who needs Hell fire when I can just drive my boot on up into some celestial gonads?"

Aziraphale chuckled. "How true." He turned, favouring Crowley with a fond smile before lending a quick kiss to the side of his neck. A kiss that was shortly thereafter followed with a disconcerted wrinkle of his upper lip. "Oh, really, could you _please_ put that cigarette out already? The temptation is terrible."

"Isn't it always where I'm concerned?" Crowley said, blowing smoke up into the air with an audacious grin. Aziraphale did not look at all impressed.

"Hush with you now. Come along, we need to finish getting changed." He gave Crowley a firm pet to the bottom as the demon stamped out the cigarette on the sidewalk and naturally left the filter right where he had ground it in. "And you need to brush your teeth and put on some cologne."

"Don't you start patting me on the backside unless you're prepared to deal with the consequences, angel." Crowley warned, still donning that same giddy smile he took to whenever Aziraphale's hand broached his lower back region.

"And what consequences might those be, exactly?"

Crowley stalled, not at all certain as to how he was supposed to play into this. Aziraphale didn't sound the least bit flirty. Just harried and... well, _harried_. How was one supposed to bat a ball back which was still lolling about the ground on the other players side of the court, whilst they contented themselves with picking at wayward strings on their tennis racket?

"I dunno. Something lurid. ...I guess."

"We're running late, we haven't time for lurid." Aziraphale closed the door smartly behind them. The sky above broke apart not two seconds later and rain drops as round and as fat as a bulldogs bollocks started to batter footpath's and rooftops alike.

Michael and Uriel, having not yet found a secluded enough spot yet in which to discretely return to Heaven, had gotten caught up in it. Soaked to the celestial skin within seconds, they got to wondering whether God might in fact have had more of a bead on what they were doing than they otherwise pretended. And was having a right proper laugh at what otherwise lamentable efforts they took in their attempts to subvert the will of one was entirely unsubvertible and ever as always incontestably ineffable.

God had a wicked sense of humour, after all. Just one look at human's 'O' face was proof enough.

**~X~**

* * *


	32. Or, in which Gabriel gazes into the void.

* * *

**~X~**

_ **~Saturday -13th of April: 11:03am~** _   
_ **The Dog & Duck, London Soho** _   
_ **Nine months to the Apex...** _

Archangel Gabriel and Lord Beelzebub sat opposite one another at the corner booth what had, in the past couple of months, become the unofficially designated off the cuff meeting area for the respective councils of Heaven and Hell. Beelzebub's modest frame was almost invisible behind the enormous pile of paperwork they had taken to hauling about like a wayward toddler and their human face bore a look of perpetual exhaustion what had become something of a permanent feature.

Gabriel, appearing well rested and every bit in as positive physical health as he always did, was checking his celestial communications device and it was clear from the broad smile what creased his handsome features that he was pleased by whatever information he had just received.

"Well..." He said, puffing a breath of air over the Cele-phone as though snuffing out a birthday candle, dimming the glow of the effervescent light it emitted. "I'm pleased to report an unusual and, much belayed, modicum of success."

Beelzebub was distracted and even if they had not been inundated by work, would likely have been driven quickly to irritation by the angels obnoxiously flowery manner of speech. _"What?"_

"Michael has managed to lock Aziraphale and the demon Crowley in for a meeting. I've forwarded the details to your office."

Which meant that somewhere down there in the dim, drippy bowels of Hell, some overworked Junior demon was tearing their hair out in an attempt to translate text to speech by use of a phone what had last seen popularity in the human world in the 1960's. Why the angel couldn't have just written the appointment time down on a sticky note, was beyond them.

"Did Michael manage to get away from the situation without having their genitalia staved in?" Beelzebub asked, glancing up towards Gabriel meaningfully. The archangel puffed air into his cheeks, still mentally sore from the memory. The 'injury' bestowed by the demon Crowley had only abated when Gabriel had returned to Heaven and his earth based genitalia had been naturally rescinded. That was still quite a few hours of agony of which he would much prefer not to be reminded of.

"Didn't say. Though I assume it wouldn't be an issue. Michael chooses not to ascribe a specific gender whilst on earth."

"Probably safer. And smarter." Beelzebub added pointedly, dashing a thick, oozing line of ink through some incorrectly detailed information and scratching out an addendum above.

"Out of interest..." Gabriel queried, eyes pinned close together to form that prudent expression Beelzebub still recognized as the preceding arrival of something impertinent. "-have you... chosen to...?"

"Your interest iz none of my concern, Archangel." The demon said, giving a particularly vicious swipe of their pen through the centre of the page they were working on and just about bisecting it as a result. "And how I may or may not chooze to present is similarly none of your buziness."

"You know..." Gabriel continued, undeterred and clearly having paid little to no attention to Beelzebub's rapidly deteriorating mood. "It's interesting but... the other day, when I went to attempt to meet with Aziraphale, well... he and the demon- Crowley, they were... they were holding hands." He gave Beelzebub a shrewd look. "You don't suppose that... that the two of them are..." He flinched his eyes shut a moment, swallowing heavily as though suddenly besieged by an intense bout of reflux. "... carnal... with one another?"

"Honestly? It wouldn't suprize me." Beelzebub replied and in such an apathetic manner that it stunned the archangel a little. "They've been among humanz a long time. And Crowley iz just disgusting enough to think that opening hiz legz to an angel would be a good idea." They trailed their eyes down Gabriel's pinned and proper designer clothes, his gawping, guppy like expression and curled their lip in blatant revulsion. "Horrifying az the thought may be."

Gabriel shuddered from stylishly coiffed head to toe. He wasn't imaginative enough to formulate a picture in his mind of Aziraphale and Crowley engaging in a coital act but the suggestion alone was enough to rancour his human body with such poignant waves of disgust that if he did in fact eat, he might very well have gone ahead and regurgitated whatever it was he had imbibed back onto the table.

"And here I thought that _sushi_ stuff was 'gross matter' enough..." He murmured, slipping his communications device back into a handstitched inside pocket. Beelzebub, sensing that business was summarily concluded, started scraping together all of the paperwork which had been slowly spreading out to cover the entirety of the sticky, wood chipped table.

"Well, unless you have any more disguzting topics of conversation you wish to trot out, I had bezt be getting back to the office."

"Surely you can afford to take a breather for five minutes." Gabriel heard himself saying. Uncertain entirely as to why he was saying it. "How important is any of this, really? Given what else is currently unfolding?"

Beelzebub foisted the last couple of pages into their shoulder bag and gave the angel a long, withering look.

"I would consider it to be very important, archangel, given that if we are to enjoy success in this venture, that the war between our people is still on the horizon and we are currently without a leader at our helm." They zipped the bag shut with such ire that they near wrenched the steel tag free. "I can see why you wouldn't be concerned with such a thing; our disorganisation lends your people an advantage. I prefer to have things in place ahead of time."

"Well, it's very admirable, but-"

Beelzebub had no time for this. They were a busy demon, with an entire Hell plain to run and very little in the way of support concerning it. If they had to choose a means by which to spend their spare time, bandying pointless preternatural semantics with the person whom had bestowed the ultimate of betrayals upon them, was far from gracing the peak of the list.

"Save your insincere praize; it's of little use to me." They said, wrapping the strap of the bag around their shoulders and preparing to depart. They were pulled up short, mainly as a matter of curiosity, as a waiter approached the table, dropped a coaster and set upon it a shot glass filled with a sinister looking black liquid. "I didn't order anything."

Gabriel looked much too proud of himself as he unnecessarily tipped the waiter the equivalent of his entire monthly wage in the form of a bank cheque. "No. I did." The archangel plucked up the glass, grinning in a manner what invited to mind the image of canary feathers protruding from between his teeth. The waiter wandered back along the path he had just travelled, goggle eyed at the number of zeroes on the cheque and already making plans to rush right out and cash it before the idiot customer went and realized his mistake.

Beelzebub stared sidelong at Gabriel, inherently suspicious as was the natural want of a demon when begrudgingly locked into the innocuous presence of an angel. Especially an angel who was making every effort to behave in a way what was customarily and inordinately out of character.

"What are you playing at?"

The archangel snorted, features perfectly poised to efface an expression of misappropriated innocence. "I don't have time to play. I'm... attempting to blend in." He raised the glass once more, his twin rows of straight white teeth easily the cleanest thing what had ever walked through the front door of the pub. "Well... if we're going to be conducting much of our business from here on earth, then it is important that I keep up appearances. I mean, the clothes are one thing, but I get the impression that a human being what sits around not drinking, or eating, or breathing is considered to be a bit odd."

"I'm surprised you have some insight as to what being 'odd' might look like." Beelzebub said, with an ironic quirk of their left brow. It might have been the usual subtle statement what would have sailed past Gabriel's ears in previous times, but he was starting to develop a better sense for nuances. Especially where Beelzebub was concerned.

"This is all far too important for us to be making missteps. Anything out of the ordinary might alert the Vices and Virtues to our movements. I need to do my part." The smile slithered down off of his face like a slinky, silk nightgown and he sank back into the wooden headrest of the corner booth. "Much as it pains me. But..." He stared resolutely into the contents of the glass; as though he had been ordered to imbibe industrial paint thinner. "-nothing hard won was ever gained without great sacrifice."

"We're talking about _eating_ and _drinking_ , you ridiculous popinjay, not amputating a limb." Beelzebub fairly much erupted. But honestly, how had they ever managed to tolerate this ludicrous creature for over a thousand years in the preceding of The Fall was beyond them.

Surely he hadn't always been such an unrepentant pain the arse? Perhaps Beelzebub had simply been far the more capable of practicing patience back in the old days? More the likely. Otherwise they could hardly fathom why they hadn't been tempted to go ahead and pitch both him and his self-indulgent, shit eaters grin over the side of the clouds before he'd had the pleasure of doing the same to them.

"I imagine such things come easy to a demon." Gabriel said, somewhat put out by Beelzebub's castigating tone of voice. "You of course would have no such concerns with tarnishing your-" He managed to pull up short here, realizing all the while that he managed to do so much too late to prevent the damage the words were likely to cause.

Sure enough, Beelzebub's resolutely still face flickered as something twitched below the surface. It was a momentary lapse, but for a being who prided themselves in being incontestably unflappable, the sudden loss of control was unsettling. Fancy, they thought. That after six thousand years this bastard can still work a knife edge in.

"Because our bodiez and soulz are already just about az tarnished as they can possibly be?" They said, unmoving and expressionless. Yet never the more dangerous. _"That_ where you were going with that?"

Gabriel set his drink down with a solemn shake of his head. Regret plunged through his veins with the obstinance of one of those awful human drugs. "I shouldn't have said that." He acknowledged, painfully aware that he had, as always, lacked insight.

Considering things in a broad, holistic manner was something he had never learned, for it had never been required of him to do so. It was straight forward, being an angel. You told the truth. Which often meant speaking what you yourself believed to be the truth. What did it matter if it resulted in hurt feelings at days close? You had to tell the truth. That was the simple matter of the way things were.

Just as demons were predisposed to lie. To lie and to cheat and to harm and to sunder and to desecrate.

 _Why then,_ Gabriel wondered, looking at Lord Beelzebub, whose face was now turned away, their lips pressed together in that way what hadn't changed in the passing of all those many years. _Why do I feel that it is I who has caused harm in this instance? Who has sundered and desecrated?_

"No. You shouldn't have." Beelzebub was saying and to Gabriel, the staunchness of their words once more reminded him that once upon a millennia ago, they were borne of the same instance. And the angel what Beelzebub had once been was wise and grounding and guided those around them with a steady hand.

Even now, in their altered state, they were the one who spoke with poise and maturity and Gabriel realized why it was he had asked for them to stay.

Over seven thousand years past, he'd once a trusted, beloved and resplendent companion of which there was no compare. The bond they shared was indescribable. Their conversation was joyous, their moments spent together transcendental.  
Not a soul he had encountered in all the eons since had ever come close to filling that void.

And it was a void. It was a void he had managed to avoid staring into up until now but a void he felt now awning cavernously inside of him. Empty and echoing and cold.

A void he could never have looked into, because it had long since swallowed him whole.

"Let me make it up to you." He heard himself saying and was greatly surprised for the composure what lent itself to his tone. He wasn't at all sure what his voice would sound like, when he attempted to speak. "I'll buy you a drink. Whatever you like."

"I'd like to throw whatever it iz you buy for me back into your face, izzz what I would _like_ to be doing." Beelzebub grumbled, still not looking at him. Gabriel shrugged, finding this a reasonable payoff given his both recent and historical indiscretions.

"If it pleases you." He gestured to the seat opposite him. "Sit. Just for ten minutes. 'Take a load off', as the humans say."

The Lord of the Infernal regions glanced down towards the chair and pursed their lips thoughtfully. They had to admit they were intrigued by the shift in Gabriel's energy. The archangel sounded just about as close to pleading as they had ever heard, and it was interesting.

Besides, it wasn't as though there was anything better waiting for them back down in Hell. The pub was warm, at least. And they could certainly use a good stiff drink or two.

"Fine." They relented, swinging the paper bloated bag back over their head and placing it on the floor before then dropping themselves down into the chair. "But you're buying lunch azzz well." They did not wait to see whether or not Gabriel would agree to this but simply picked up the menu and started perusing the food options.

"Very well." The archangel said agreeably. What was money but a human construct with no inherent value anyway? "Whatever you want."

"What izz it that you ordered there anyway?"

Gabriel picked up the shot glass again and looked at it curiously. "You know, I'm not altogether certain. Something called Sambuca?" He leaned close, taking a whiff of the liquid before recoiling with a visible grimace. "Oh. It smells dreadful!"

"Well, of course it does. It'zz Sambuca. Here." Beelzebub went and performed a strangely charitable service in reaching over to take the shot glass and its imminent devastating effects out of the ignorant angel's hands. "If this izz your first time drinking anything, let alone alcohol, you are not popping your cherry with Sambuca. Besides, it'zz not the sort of thing that I could envision the human that you are attempting to emulate drinking."

Gabriel raised his perfectly groomed brows softly in response to this. "What sort of beverage do you suppose a human such as myself might drink then?"

Beelzebub hrrmed thoughtfully to themselves, leaning back in the chair to grant the archangel a visual appraisal. Gabriel sat a little straighter in his seat, feeling much like he had when fronting up for active duty an hour before the apocalypse had been unceremoniously cancelled.

"Something odious and suitably pompous. Like a martini." The demon mused some more before something came to mind and they snapped their fingers for want of stumbling up on it. "No. I have it. Chardonnay."

"Chardonnay... that's a type of... wine, isn't it?"

"Yes. It izz perfect for you. Go to the bar and order a chardonnay. And get me a Talking Monkey while you're at it."

Gabriel, halfway out of his seat, twisted about so as to pull a sceptical face. "Get you a what?"

"It izz a type of drink." Beelzebub drawled, back to being as superfluously bored as ever. "Do you honestly think I would try and make a fool out of you?" As an afterthought to this, they called out once more to Gabriel as he started to make his way up towards the bar. "Oh. Make certain that when you order your chardonnay that you don't pronounce the 'H'. It's traditionally silent."

Gabriel mulled this over a moment. "... So... it's pronounced cardonnay?"

Beelzebub clucked their tongue and cocked their finger towards him supportively. "Now you've got it." They said, watching as Gabriel nodded thoughtfully to himself and meandered up to the bar in a surprisingly self-conscious manner. The demon felt themselves smiling and realized that in the past few weeks, they had in fact been doing this quite a lot more than they had ever done in their six thousand years of forced instalment in Hell.

Curious indeed. And perhaps rather the worth sticking around for.

Sure as Heaven beat paperwork.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Getting closer by the day, my lovelies! Thank you as always for taking time out of your day to spend with my little story. Are you enjoying it so far? Where there any scenes in particular that you liked or something you read which stuck with you? If so, I would love to hear about it! Drop some words into that comment box and you would absolutely make an old soaks week! :)
> 
> Don't forget to kick that kudos button in the human testicles if you enjoyed, or bookmark for if you would like to come back and do a bit more reading after. I'm going to pop along now and get a bit more work done on the new content, and I will see you when I have time so as to update a little bit more during the week!
> 
> Take care my dears and as always, with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	33. Or, in which we learn that Aziraphale is demonic catnip.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hastur was wearing a wide brimmed, lace trimmed black hat what was barely in fashion over a century past and an equally moth eaten dress of the same shade, which looked as though he had waded through fire whilst draped in it. Dagon was only slightly less ludicrously attired; dressed in a suit which was navy, rather than black, none of the seams hemmed and wearing a bowler hat on a somewhat jaunty angle. They hunkered under an umbrella which was barely retaining a shred of its original material, though neither demon looked to have gotten so much as a dribble of water on their respective person's.
> 
> "What in the... Wha-?!" Aziraphale spluttered, caught rather imperiously off guard. It was difficult to say what it was he was more the thrown off by; the demon's or their ludicrous disguises. "What are you doing here?!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Good Omens-ervation of the day: In the script book, Crowley once refers to Aziraphale as 'Dude'. I have the most overwhelming desire to fit this in somewhere and see if I can make it work. Kind of hard to imagine Crowley referring to anyone as 'dude', however... especially now they're in a romantic relationship. How would that even go? "Hey dude, be a lamb and pass the lube, would you?" o_O
> 
> Welcome back everyone! As forever and always, thanks to all of you who are reading and especially to those of you who are commenting, groin stomping that kudos button and bookmarking. Rest assured, every bit of extra fuel I get, powers this beast just that little bit faster!
> 
> To those readers what are new to the story, I hope you enjoy the update! To my original crew, thanks so much for being so amazing and patient whilst waiting for the new stuff! Chapter 54 is actually complete, so once these updates are out of the way, I will have something fresh to bring your way!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 13th of April, 1:15pm~** _

_**Clarkson Funeral Home, Suburban London** _

Crowley met Aziraphale around the passenger side of the car. As a sort of sweet and ironic contrast to the time of their first acquaintance, Crowley held an umbrella over both of their heads. He wasn't happy about it. Not so much where the holding of the umbrella was concerned, but the fact that the umbrella, like so much of what Aziraphale supposed to be 'nifty' was tartan. It was one of three that he owned; all of which were tartan. This one simply had more a concentration of black hemmed throughout the pattern, which was the closest chance Crowley had in the reaching of a compromise.

In the times when he hadn't been so concerned with magic, he might have simply gone right on ahead and changed it. He wasn't this spiteful. Nor so careless. Worse things in the world than getting about under the shade of a tartan umbrella.

Maybe.

"Modest turn out." He said, focusing instead on what was truly worth focusing on. He observed the mottled assortment of human mourners what had gathered in under cover within the garden area; mostly residents and staff of the nursing home. "...That's to be expected. Most of the people she knew in life predeceased her." He staggered a breath out, feeling yet again that not so accustomed pinch of emotion. _Should be more... should be more people, why aren't there more people?_ "Still... not so bad. Far as the crow flies."

"It's a lovely spot." Aziraphale commented, though one would be hard pressed to find anything particularly 'lovely' on a day quite as dreary and drizzly as this. But then he had lived in Scotland a while and if one did not learn to look on the positive side of foul weather, they were all the likely to wind up a bloated, suicidal drunk before long.

Aziraphale turned to glance at Crowley with a look of softly hewn concern. There were so many factors at play here; not many of which the demon was accustomed to dealing with. "Are you sure you're going to be...?"

"I'll manage." Crowley twisted his neck from side to side, giving himself over to a moment of physicality based insecurity. He straightened a tie that had likely only strayed a bare inch or so during the drive over. "Do I look all right?"

"You look very smart. Oh, mustn't forget the rose that you purchased."

"Thanks. Almost forgot." Crowley handed Aziraphale the umbrella, who kept it elevated above both their heads as the demon reached back into the car and plucked a red rose off of the centre panel of the Bentley's seat. He had stopped in at a flower shop on the way up to the funeral home, wanting some small tokenistic gesture to impart upon Gretchen before her burial and had gone just about as red as the blessed flower from all of Aziraphale's emotional blustering as a result.

Crowley shut and locked the car door, storing his keychain in his inside pocket before jutting out his right elbow. Aziraphale, as conditioned to the gesture as Crowley was in making it, slipped his hand into the proffered nook and permitted himself to be guided down the stone path towards the funeral home. He kept the umbrella sectioned firmly above their heads; the thick drops of rain driving against the material with a staccato so deafening that they were required to just about shout so as to be heard above it.

"Feels like this bloody shirt is choking me..." Crowley grumble-yelled, hooking his finger into the uppermost button and tugging against it so as to provide some counter leverage against his throat.

"Well, you look very handsome in it." Aziraphale said, unconcerned regards the demon's entirely negligent distress. Discomfort was oftentimes a mere by product of being both stylish and presentable. Such as having one's head lopped off during a French Revolution. It was simply the price one paid for fashion.

And really... someone who swanned about in pants so tight they might very well have been airbrushed on, had no place whinging about discomfort. Circulatory inhibition was clearly not a mitigating factor in how this demon judged suitability in attire.

"Not often that I get to see you so dressed up." Aziraphale added then, in a sort of brooding offhand: "Rather wish you would make the effort at some of the restaurants we frequent..."

"Oh, don't start..."

"All I was going to say, was is it too much to expect that you might do your top two buttons up on occasion? I mean, really..."

"But then how would anyone see my luxurious floof of chest hair?" Crowley said, his concern somewhat literal. When presenting as a male, nothing suggested authenticity far more than a generous spattering of chest hair, just fashionably visible through the intentionally negated top two buttons of ones shirt. He was rather the proud of it, given the slender, oft times referred 'lanky' nature of his human body. And the fact that he wasn't actually capable of producing testosterone.

"It's hardly a 'floof'." Aziraphale said, he himself being no stranger to chest filament and flummoxed as to why anyone felt the need to put it on display. Weren't there more interesting things occupying the scenery that one might look at, as opposed to the protruding spider leg like follicles creeping out over buttons that really ought to have been buttoned? "More like a mirkin that's been lost in the base of an adult movie directors costume trunk for some decades and quietly lost the will to live somewhere along the way."

Crowley, as surprised by the context of the statement as he was delighted by it, tilted his head back and barely succeeded in stifling the snort of laughter what threatened to erupt.

"Please, don't make me laugh. This is supposed to be a serious occasion!"

"Just trying to buck you up, dear." Aziraphale said, pleased such as he always was by getting a laugh out of the demon. They both managed to put on their very best sombre and funeral appropriate expressions however, as Rita, draped in a black dress which somehow succeeded in wearing her more than she was wearing _it,_ emerged from one of the clouds of people gathered on the outskirts of the garden and marched her way over to them.

"Thank you again for all your hard work, Mr. Fell." She said, keeping her carefully coifed hair dry from beneath the balcony of a suitably black umbrella that Crowley had taken to casting envious glances at. "Everything looks absolutely wonderful; we're extremely grateful."

Aziraphale gave an expectantly humble wave of his hand. "Oh, no thanks required, my dear. It was the least I could do."

"What's going on?" Crowley asked. Rita's eyes were turned off to the side in their sockets, a habit she employed when she was distracted. He'd not often cause to see it; given how put together and organized the woman was and this was proof enough that something was troubling her. "You look worried."

Rita looked at him properly now, working her bottom lip from side to side as though weighing up the pro's and cons of sharing her thoughts. She glanced over her shoulder quickly before taking in a deep breath and letting it out with such gravity that her shoulders rolled back in their sockets from the force of it.

"I'm afraid something the rather unexpected has come up."

Crowley's nerves took a violent, pendulum like swoop which fair knocked his own breath back up into his mouth. _What had gone wrong? What did_ we _do wrong? What did we miss? What -_ "Which is?"

Rita, clearly sensing the subtle shift in Crowley's tone, placed a palm about his wrist in a soothing manner. It surprised him more to find that it actually worked a little.

"Don't panic; everything is fine so far as the arrangements are concerned." She gave a discreet flick of her head off towards the right, gesturing to something just beyond the realm of her shoulder. "It seems as though Gretchen's husband has some remaining family. A niece. She's here with her husband."

Crowley was used to his glasses providing some cover for his gaze, so he may well have lacked some subtlety in how he whipped about and brazenly stared at the aforementioned couple hunkered in under a white frosted gazebo. Nothing about them jumped out as being particularly offensive; modest, funeral appropriate attire, suitably maligned expressions. He did not trust them so far as he could pick them up and throw them.

"Well, how's that for timing? Where the Hea-" He paused, clearing his throat. Humans were not acquainted with the delicate particulars of that contraindicative turn of phrase. "-Hell have they been the last how many years she's been living at the Grange?"

"They live in France and from what little I can gather, they didn't have a great deal of contact with Alfred once he moved to England." Crowley could tell from the tone of her voice, that Rita did in fact share his suspicions but was attempting to be professionally diplomatic and not build upon his own disconcertment. "She was his niece after all."

"How nice of them then to make the effort to show up and pay their respects." Crowley sneered waspishly. Aziraphale might have chastised him for it, but was himself in quiet agreement. The circumstances were just far too convenient.

"I expect that you will be civil, Anthony." Rita warned, feeling a little surprised himself to find that without his glasses, 'Anthony' looked rather the more demure when he was being chastised. The glasses gave the impression that his facial expressions were much harder, but he did in fact have rather large eyes; which softened him considerably. "They wanted to speak with you, given that you're probably the only one here who is likely able to understand what it is they are saying. And in two months you likely had more to do with Gretchen than most anyone else who was working at the Grange."

"Probably." Crowley mumbled, making no effort so as not to appear snotty. Aziraphale pinched the inside of his arm reproachfully, flashing a smile at the demon's offended look in response to it.

"Here they come now." Rita tapped the back of Crowley's hand to ensure that he was paying attention. "Remember, you represent the Grange. Be professional." She herself worked a smile onto her face which Crowley interpreted as being particularly strained as the couple drifted over to join them. Crowley roughly placed them as being in their early to mid-fifties; both darked haired and remarkably unremarkable, so far as appearances went.

"This is Anthony." Gretchen said, speaking in that slow, deliberate manner what humans thought made all the difference when addressing someone of a different nationality. "He worked closely with Gretchen over the past few months."

The couple shook hands with Crowley, introducing themselves as Esmée and Paul, respectively. (Esmée in particular looked more the pleased for making his acquaintance and visibly straightened her spine so as to pronounce particular... aspects of her figure. Aziraphale was accustomed to this by now. It was not unusual, when one spent so long in Crowley's company, to hear the resonating crackle of so many female's vertebrae snap into place whenever he walked into a room).

Crowley, not noticing Esmée's decidedly unsubtle display of interest (or more the likely, not caring) greeted them in French (for which they appeared to be enormously relieved) and introduced Aziraphale as his partner, Alex. Mistaking his outwardly calm demeanour as genuine civility, Rita took her leave, perhaps more the assured by the fact that 'Alex' seemed to have a firm handle on his more emotionally indulgent second half.

"We understand we have you to thank for not only taking such wonderful care of Aunt Gretchen, but for putting all of this together on her behalf." Esmée said, her voice dripping with grossly insincere concern for a person she had plainly entertained very little interest in during her living years. Crowley knew horse shit when he heard it. He'd been playing this game a long time and he could play it better than some mousy two-bit French fink. He had practically invented smarm. In fact, if the word were to have an accompanying picture in the dictionary, it would not have at all surprised him to see his own headshot given pride of place beside it.

" _Actually_ , it's my partner who deserves most of the thanks." He turned his head towards Aziraphale, showing off just about every cunning tooth in his devious little mouth. Aziraphale frowned at him, a little confused as to why the demon was suddenly oozing more charm than a political candidate in their final, flailing sprint for office. "He made the contributions as a private citizen. As an employee of the Grange, it would be a conflict of interest, you see. Alex was kind enough to step in."

Aziraphale was considerably out of practice with the French language (if it had been Japanese, he would have been all over that _mono_ ) but got the overall gist of what Crowley was saying; having heard mention of his human ascribed name. He naturally responded with yet another, almost automated by this stage, flap of his hand.

"Oh, _non, non_... it was, uh... how you say... _l' honneur_. Non, um... _reconnaissance requiredé. La plaisir_ was... _mienne..._ " He knew he was not at all succeeding in his venture to accurately communicate, from the odd looks the others were now giving him. He took a mental glance back over his words, wondering where he might have slipped up. "Oh, wait... _mienne_... that was the, uh... the feminine pronoun, wasn't it? Let me try again-"

Crowley, quietly amused, made a zipping motion with his fingers. "That'll do, angel." He said in English and Aziraphale, very much relieved, took his advice and promptly retired his efforts to communicate.

"We didn't have a great deal to do with dear Aunt Gretchen." Paul was saying. He had a modest spattering of hair on his chin, what might have been attempting to pass for a Van Dyke but was falling selectively short by the approximate measure of twelve and a half whiskers. He stroked his finger against it a lot. A gesture which made Crowley feel vaguely uncomfortable and wanting to cross his legs, for some reason. "Very difficult what with the distance between our countries. But it sounds as though she was well taken care of in her later years. Rest assured, we are very grateful."

"Your gratitude is acknowledged." Crowley said, with a smile as though someone had just gone and dropped a badger turd into his upper breast pocket. It was not a kind smile and though Aziraphale might not have been able to make heads or tails of the words that were coming out of his mouth, he could translate the demons' expression all too accurately. All the simpler still, for the fact that Crowley was not wearing his glasses and his eyes had always been far too expressive so far as hiding his feelings were concerned.

Aziraphale cleared his throat in the slightest, most inoffensive manner at his disposal and gave Crowley yet another pointed pinch to the inside of his arm. To detract from what he felt was rather the obvious display of discourtesy on the demon's behalf, Aziraphale turned his own hundred watt smile up another quarter notch, so that he radiated pure, effervescent will from every channel of his body.

"Uh... _Je vous adresse mes sincères condoléances._ " He said, which was one of the few phrases of French that he retained in his ostensibly limited arsenal. Up there right along with 'Can you direct me to the nearest eatery in which I might purchase crepes?' 'What are the chef's recommendations?' and 'Can you direct me to the nearest dry cleaners where they might remove this stain that I acquired from dropping a crepe into my lap?'

If the couple had picked up on Crowley's indecorous malaise they showed little signs of being bothered by it; giving a small, polite by all appearances nod, before drifting back towards the open doors of the chapel. Crowley glared from beneath the jut of his brow like an ill-tempered hermit crab casting weary aspersions from the awning of its Conca shell.

"Their intentions aren't good, angel." He murmured, showing immense restraint in waiting until the couple were out of earshot before speaking his mind. The heavy pattering of the rain would likely have drowned him out but Crowley was obviously attempting, in that minimalistic means by which he was capable, to remain respectful of the situation.

A venerable sign of his having matured somewhat, Aziraphale thought and felt yet another small flush of pride warm the burrows of his chest.

"Yes. Yes, I rather got the gist of that myself." He replied. Angel's were far more astute at sensing the positives of emotions, such as love, kindness and generosity but an noticeable absence of all these things was telling in and of itself. Aziraphale had felt not so much as a flicker of anything which would suggest that the couple had a genuine care for Gretchen.

"They're wondering if they can get anything out of her. The greed, it..." Crowley's upper lip hiked up and away from his canine; as though something foul smelling had been passed beneath his nose. "- it _peels_ off of them. Like an orange rind."

A clever metaphor, Aziraphale thought. One which was more than appropriate.

"Gretchen didn't have a last will and testament. And all of her funds reside with a financial administrator." Aziraphale had conferred with the administrator, only as a means of ensuring that Gretchen's wishes, concerns the disposal of her remains and distribution of her estate, were being respected. He had gleaned, through these exchanges, that Gretchen had made no such declarations regards what was intended to happen to either her body or her modest savings. Confidentiality prohibited him from enquiring as to just how much Gretchen's administrator had managed to put away on her behalf and he would not have been so crass as to ask in the first place. "What could they possibly hope to gain, I wonder?"

"If there's no remaining family, the funds are absorbed into the state." Crowley said. He knew a little about these things. Legal studies were considered mandatory training in Hell, given the propensity of evil doing what might be conducted under the banner of the law. "But Gretchen always told me that she wanted what money she had remaining to go to charity."

Aziraphale sighed softly, reaching up to impart a consolatory squeeze to Crowley's wrist. "I do hate to say it, darling but the expressing of one's wishes to a care provider is not in itself a binding contract."

"Yes, I _know_ that." Crowley said, somewhat annoyed. "Woman never put much stock in what was going to be happening after she was dead." He held up the rose, turning the stem so as to admire the tight clutch of the vivid red bulb. Not even in full bloom and already cut free from the bush. Didn't seem right... "I just... _hate_ the idea of some greedy little vultures swooping in before the bodies even cold and all but prizing her rings off of her fingers during the viewing. It just... it lacks a certain style."

"Well, I don't like it any more than you do. Unfortunately, without a will there's not much that can be done. They are related to her through marriage after all."

"All it would take was a snap of my fingers and something _could_ be done." Crowley murmured, staring off towards the chapel and chewing at the corner of his lip in that thoughtful manner what usually preceded mischief. It was a gesture what quite naturally and, quite rightfully, concerned Aziraphale.

"What do you mean? You don't mean..." He lowered his voice, though what point there was in doing so when there was no one close by and the rain was so very heavy on the canopy of their umbrella. _"-killing them, do you?"_

Crowley's small bud of annoyance was rapidly bursting into full bloom. "You've known me _how long,_ angel? Sadly, there ain't no air to earth missiles around for me to redirect last minute." He sighed, glancing down at his brand new pair of expensive shoes and frowned to see that a small glob of grass speckled mud had adhered itself to the toe. "Besides... killing people was never really my thing. Always leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Kind of like a bad clam."

"What were you suggesting, then?" Aziraphale asked, providing some counter balance as Crowley awkwardly hefted his leg up so as to flick the piece of mud away and glance his thumb over the mark it had left. They were a gift from Aziraphale, the shoes, and as such, he could afford to be a little fussy with their care.

"Suppose that in some office somewhere out there, Gretchen's last Will and Testament finds itself in the hands of some Executor?" Crowley suggested, in a tone of voice what might be adopted by the host of some late night, mystery television program. Wending you into the woes of a story so torrid, so fantastical, that you would be left an inconsolable wreck, hunkered under your duvet all through the hours of the long night, jerking at every creaking shift of the house like a shell-shocked Vietnam vet whose anti-anxiety meds still hadn't quite yet levelled out. "An Executor, who finds written there, that her final wishes are for her remaining funds to be distributed to charity, just as she wanted it to be?"

"But there _is_ no will." Aziraphale frowned, quite honestly confused as to why Crowley was wasting his time with this pointless meandering flirtation with fantasy land. He might as well have just come out and said, _'Suppose that in some far off distant jungle, where mankind has never before stepped, the manticore spends his idle hours occupied with the pursuit of food, companionship and canasta'._ Both statements seemed about as pointless a waste of breath as each other in so far as how realistic they were.

Crowley rolled his eyes, momentarily forgetting that Aziraphale, by nature of his being an angel, was oftentimes far too literal. Giving depth to broad statements required him to be virtually led on in, so that the subtle inference between the lines could be highlighted for his attention. After all, an angel was hardly about to go searching for hidden malicious meaning, were they?

"That's where the finger snapping comes into effect." He waited for the penny to drop in Aziraphale's mind. Saw it resonate in the form of the angel's eyes widening as he picked up on his meaning. "Hmm?"

"But that would be lying." Aziraphale said this as though Crowley was not in fact aware that the act would be entirely nefarious and dishonest. That he required educating on the premise.

"It's not lying, per see, it's just..." Crowley dithered, scrambling for any other description what did not amount to 'grand mal deceit'. "-giving form to Gretchen's true wishes."

Crowley had managed to convince Aziraphale of the benefits of any number of things in the past. Aziraphale had been pliable where some arguments had been particularly compelling; especially those what might have ultimately benefitted himself in the short to long term. Of these circumstances, Crowley himself also stood to gain.

What resonated deeply with Aziraphale in this moment, however, was the extraordinary selflessness of Crowley's intentions. The desire to subvert the conditions of reality and pervert the incontestable truth of the circumstances, so as to, in some small means, protect the interests of someone to whom he retained very genuine feelings of affection.

It sent a soft panging through Aziraphale's human heart. For it was beautiful and kind and it changed _nothing_.

"If Gretchen had strong feelings pertaining to the distributing of her estate, she had ample opportunity in which to put those desires to paper." He said firmly and despairing in his having to serve as the voice of such cold, stringent reason. But he was the pragmatist of the two and it was his feet set square upon the ground what prevented Crowley's from drifting away on any number of occasions. "She _chose_ not to do so. In your own words, those sorts of things did not seem to matter to her after she was gone."

"Perhaps she might have felt differently if she had known some money grubbing little gimboids were going to be sniffing around hoping to profit." Crowley sneered, looking for all intents and purposes as though he were about to go charging off, new suit and shoes be blessed, and hurl said 'gimboids' out into the mud, where he would be the likely to instruct Aziraphale to dispense a thrashing on his behalf.

Aziraphale squeezed Crowley's arm, far the softer and more temperately than his earlier, reproachful pinching's. "Darling, I understood full well where you are coming from and I agree that the situation is distasteful and upsetting but think for a moment about what you are suggesting." He was trying to meet Crowley's eyes but the demon was doing that very annoying thing he was prone to doing when upset and staring straight and unwaveringly ahead, lips jutted out so dramatically that some tired pensioner might very well feel tempted to perch upon them. "Gretchen made a _choice_ to not put her wishes to paper. That was her _choice_ , Crowley. It's what the human race is all about. If you were to fabricate something on her behalf, you are betraying that very autonomy what you yourself gave them opportunity to experience in the first place."

It was a good argument and Crowley struggled with it, just as Aziraphale knew that he would. It was the self-same reasoning that he had seen fit to trot out any number of times he wanted to prove a point about the causality of the human condition. A difficult factor to contest.

"But... but it's... wrong, Aziraphale." He finally said, looking all too awfully wretched and desperate. The soft panging of the angel's heart lent a lick of pain through one of the channels interred there. He took his hand from where it had been clutched into the crook of Crowley's elbow and set his palm instead to the demon's back. He caressed him gently, still the more at odds himself with Crowley's sadness. It was a thing what was every bit as lovely as it was heartbreaking.

"I _know_ that it's wrong. And I love that you see it for what it is; that you are incensed by it." He smiled at him sadly but at the same time positively flush with adoration. "How very lovely you are, in this moment, my dear heart. How decent and righteous and fair-minded, much as you have always been."

Crowley might once have reacted to such a description with stroppy virulence but gone were the days in which he felt that such words served as a barrier by which to keep him sequestered from Aziraphale. That wasn't to say that the words did not still gross him out to the extreme, but the offense was markedly muted. He bore it with somewhat good humour, scuffing the toe of one of his shoes against the soppy earth and immediately regretting it.

"Please, I feel sick enough as it is. Now you want to just tip me over the edge, make me vomit all over my new suit?" He grumbled, balancing on one leg again so as to clean the grime off of his shoe.

"Yes, well, forgive me for praising your fairer qualities." Aziraphale gave a tolerant chuckle, taking hold of Crowley's arm once more to assist him with balancing himself. "That being said and in spite of how strongly you feel about the injustice of it all, you mustn't take action against them."

Crowley gave an annoyed growl, just about falling sideways but yanked upright at the very last moment by Aziraphale's firm hold on him.

"But-"

 _"No."_ The angel's voice was every bit as firm and as no-nonsense as Crowley had ever heard it. "I forbid it."

Crowley, having attended to his shoe and straightened up, stared at Aziraphale with an expression the angel was rather surprised to see. He did not in fact look annoyed for being pulled into line but rather the more... intrigued by it.

"What do you mean _'You forbid it?'_ Since when could you _forbid_ me from doing anything?"

Aziraphale, still somewhat confused by the good nature in which Crowley was processing his demands, straightened out the lapels of his suit jacket and reaffirmed his grip upon the handle of the umbrella. Small things, yes, but grounding things.

"I gather that being romantically attached is one of the few arrangements in which we have the unerring right to 'forbid' one another from engaging in certain untoward behaviour." He established and was more the surprised to see a grin break out across Crowley's face as though he had caught the angel uttering a forbidden word under his breath. For someone who enjoyed his freedom as much as Crowley, it seemed a very odd thing that he would seemingly derive some enjoyment from Aziraphale's attempts to somewhat suppress it. "With the unspoken yet intrinsically understood threat of certain privileges rescinded for a set period of time or the oft employed and ever so effective silent treatment."

To this, Crowley offered a derisive snort which suggested he had likely not heard anything quite so ridiculous in all his long years of life. "Please. You've given me the silent treatment for decades at a time. Never lost much sleep over it." (This was very much a lie. Crowley had slept precious little in those ever the more contentious days and was forced to make up for it during the times in which they had otherwise been speaking). "And it's a little difficult to withhold the sex that we're not actually having."

Aziraphale recalled that this was indeed something which humans reportedly manipulated one another with; the withholding of intercourse so as to make some manner of point. He could hardly see that it would be something which would hold much weight with a creature such as himself. Far the more time in which to get some reading done.

"I could withhold the hugging. ...and the kissing." He added as an afterthought. Crowley brought his lips back sharply from his teeth, hissing his very poignant disconcertion with the notion. He rather liked those things. Once upon a time, before he'd been the recipient of either, being without would not have bothered him in the slightest but the thought of lying alone in bed again, going to sleep without having Aziraphale there to wrap himself about like a creeper vine...

"Oooch. Now your threats carry weight indeed, angel." Crowley said, earning a soft, appreciative chuckle from Aziraphale. They were distracted from whichever turn the conversation might now have taken, in the arrival of Alice; who squelched her way towards them through the mud, aerating the lawn with heels that were hardly at all suited to the conditions and shielding her hair with her handbag as she came.

"Oh my stars, Cumquat you've got _eyes!"_ She exclaimed as she sidled up, her own eyes just about popping out of her skull as she got her first, properly uninhibited look of Crowley without his glasses.

"Yep. Put 'em in for a special occasion." Crowley said, holding his hand up to his eyes and making a popping sound as though he were in fact capable of removing said eyes at will. Alice continued to stare at him in awe as Aziraphale, ever the gentlemen, directed the umbrella over so as to now shelter her beneath its tartan awning as well. Careful observers might have picked up on the fact that the umbrella, only just barely accommodating the heads of two people, was quickly encroaching a circumference what might have rivalled a wedding marquis.

"Geez... I never imagined they'd be so wide. And so green!"

"I told you that they were beautiful." Aziraphale said, with a sort of preening countenance what came from affiliate pride. And because Crowley was looking at him somewhat oddly, added: "It came up over dinner."

"Oh, yes. When Alice was running interference on our behalves." Crowley said, casting a mock sort of goading sneer at his work colleague, who naturally just served it back with interest.

"Well _someone_ had to. I'm just glad to see it's all worked out." Alice reached over to pet her hand to Aziraphale's arm. "But you tell me the moment that it doesn't, gorgeous, and I'll be on your doorstep with bells on and a diamond ring in my pocket."

"You're a bloody hyena, you are." Crowley said with a smile, more the pleased by her partiality to Aziraphale than feeling threatened by it. It was a compliment as to what a truly remarkable creature he was and it was a proud, and wondrous thing to stand beside him and have people know that they were together.

Aziraphale deserved to be adored. He deserved to be recognized for how lovely and kind he was.

Aziraphale also dealt with praise far more graciously than Crowley and gave a soft, amenable chuckle at Alice's words.

"As soon as the God's create him, a man what will be worthy of you shall be just around the corner, I'm certain dear." He said, so charmingly that Alice just about went and melted on the spot. It was hardly at all helped by Aziraphale extending his free arm and taking her into the sort of soft and warm embrace that would leave even the world's angriest serial killer a spineless, compliant mess upon the floor. "It is lovely to see you again, dear. In spite of the circumstances."

Alice gave what Crowley fancied to be a rather sort of brazen sigh, managing to keep her chin elevated off of Aziraphale's shoulder in fear that her foundation would leave marks against the material. If her makeup had not been a concern, Crowley thought she might very well have just crawled on into his skin and made herself a home there.

"Oh, your hugs make everything feel right with the world, Alex." She disinterred herself from Aziraphale's embrace with about as much difficulty as a child-proof cap comes free from a medicine bottle (especially when the attempt is made by a fully functioning adult) and turned her attention, somewhat less excitedly, to Crowley. "Hey Cumquat."

"Hey." He gave her a hug. It was the sort of half-hearted, one armed, ribcages barely touching variety of hug. An demonstrative show of affection for someone like Crowley.

They were both sad. They had both lost a client and the shared sensitivity of the situation lent its own unique brand of intimacy to the exchange.

"So..." Alice said, leaning back on her heels and unzipping her purse. She opened the centre section, in which a small mirror was installed and used it to attend to the flyaway's what had escaped from her otherwise carefully styled hair. "-out of the blue, some private citizen pays for ol' Gretch's funeral. Who would've thunk it?"

"Indeed." Aziraphale mused mysteriously. "Very peculiar."

"Very generous really." Crowley contributed in an equally vague manner. Alice gave them a shifty look, which suggested that they weren't being nearly as clever as they might have thought they were being.

"It was you guys, wasn't it?"

Aziraphale gave that awkward, blustery smile he so often resorted to when he was attempting to waylay the truth. It fooled no one, Crowley suspected and wondered why the angel persisted with trotting it out as though it were an otherwise effective strategy.

"Oh, Anthony couldn't have been involved with such a thing. Why, it would be a conflict of interest."

"So it was just _you_ then?"

Aziraphale looked every bit like a child whose hand had been caught firmly ensconced within the cookie jar. "I'm..." He straightened his lapels for the second time in so many minutes and cleared his throat in a manner so theatrically unconvincing that Crowley couldn't help but smile at it. "-not at liberty to say."

"We're trying to be discreet about it." Crowley said, taking up Aziraphale's hand and giving it a soft squeeze. Still every bit as grateful for the angel's support with all this terribly transient mortal stuff as he was the day he had heard of Gretchen's passing.

"Yeah, of course, of course." Alice gave a conspiratorial smile as she zipped her purse shut and leaned close, lowering her voice in spite of the smoke screen that the rain otherwise provided. _"It was very kind of you."_

Aziraphale felt a little discomforted by the praise. Yes, it had perhaps been a kindness, but it had been only a kindness so far as Crowley was concerned. Aziraphale had not known Gretchen but he had known just how much Crowley had cared for her and wanted to do whatever he could so as to lessen the severity of the grief. When people adopted the view that he was simply a holistically benign and genuine person, it seemed... dishonest somehow and made him feel uncomfortable.

But of course, explaining the technicalities of such things would have been worse than inappropriate at a time such as this. And so, Aziraphale simply smiled, giving that little scrunch of his nose what was ever so endearing and permitted them to think whatever it was that saw them happily through the day.

"Hey Cumquat? You wanna sneak off for a quick cheeky before the ceremony starts?" Alice was saying, gesturing with her head back over her shoulder in a meaningful way. Words and a gesture what were not at all meaningful to Aziraphale and he narrowed his eyes uncertainly.

"Quick... cheeky?"

"She means a fag, angel." Crowley sort-of translated; an admission that sent Alice to rolling her eyes so that they were directed into the underside of the ever expanding tartan umbrella.

"Dude, I was trying _not_ to get you in trouble."

"You just made it sound like we were about to go off and make frisky in a bush, or something." Crowley said, pulling a face and getting an equally as off-putting expression in return for the suggestion.

"As _if_. That's the sort of cheeky I would be inviting Alex too, not your grim little arse."

Aziraphale chuckled and waved a hand as though shooing the pair of them off.

"It's fine. Just try and not take too long."

"Someone forbid you had to socialize with anyone other than us." Crowley teased, glancing out from under the umbrella and realizing that he was about to get his carefully groomed head of hair wet.

"I _meant_ that the ceremony starts in ten minutes, dear." The angel reached under the right hand side of his lapel and retrieved from somewhere therein, one of those ever so handy umbrella's what might otherwise easily be stored within a handbag. He unbound it from the plastic cover and extended the surprisingly generous canopy, handing it over to Crowley so that he and Alice would have shelter whilst they hustled off for their smoke. It was also tartan, the demon observed with an ungracious sniff. "And I'm _not_ the one who has issues with meeting new people."

As Crowley and Alice sauntered off through the peat bog and clay to sneak a cigarette in some more discreet a locale, Aziraphale found himself, with nothing other to occupy his attentions, shifting them towards Esmée and Paul. They were standing just inside of the doorway of the chapel, making a big show it seemed, of greeting most everyone passing through.

 _How officious_ , he thought, with a feeling what might have resembled Crowley's disconcertment to a somewhat more diluted degree. _They hadn't a hand, so much as a finger, in organizing a wit of this and then they march on in all Lord and Lady of the manor, adding insult to injury. Seeking to profit from the few accumulative gains of a poor old woman who they clearly cared nothing for._

 _Some humans,_ he thought, _have no sense of shame._

_Some non-humans too, for that matter._

Wheels set to turning in Aziraphale's head. They might have seen fit to saddle on up and take his mind on a protracted existential journey but a stout tap on the shoulder shattered the travel plans entirely and he turned to see one of the most purely bizarre spectacles of which he had ever before encountered. And this was certainly saying something. Aziraphale had lived a far from ordinary life, after all.

It was Duke Hastur and Lord Dagon; dressed as, they might have deemed appropriate, for a human funeral. Which is to say that the attempt was, of course, offensively garish.

Hastur was wearing a wide brimmed, lace trimmed black hat what was barely in fashion over a century past and an equally moth eaten dress of the same shade, which looked as though he had waded through fire whilst draped in it. Dagon was only slightly less ludicrously attired; dressed in a suit which was navy, rather than black, none of the seams hemmed and wearing a bowler hat on a somewhat jaunty angle. They hunkered under an umbrella which was barely retaining a shred of its original material, though neither demon looked to have gotten so much as a dribble of water on their respective person's.

"What in the... _Wha-?!"_ Aziraphale spluttered, caught rather imperiously off guard. It was difficult to say what it was he was more the thrown off by; the demon's or their ludicrous disguises. "What are you doing here?!"

"We've come to pay our respects, of course." Hastur said, who had been feeling confident right up until the very moment the angel had turned around. And then he rather felt as though his own tongue had dropped dead between the confines of his teeth.

Hastur and Dagon had never met Aziraphale; so far as they had been aware. The angel had in fact had the pleasure whilst inhabiting Crowley's body, which had worked in shielding his own celestial spirit with the overlay of the demons innate biology. They had never properly interacted with Aziraphale as he truly was. And the full impact was far more than what either demon had been anticipating.

Human beings base an inordinate amount of attraction concerns the physical. Most of them would look at the human body Aziraphale inhabited and describe him as a man what was kind looking, with a warm smile and lovely eyes, but not particularly 'striking' in ways what were particularly useful so far as they were concerned. He would probably not have scored himself any lead roles in Hollywood action movies.

But angels and demons had senses what transgressed far beyond the physical. They had a sixth, spiritual sense; what allowed them to ascend the tangible, flesh based veil and get a bead on the shape and nature of the spirit what dwelt within.

The Heaven based angels had preternatural spirits what felt as warm but as distant as the sun. The angel Aziraphale possessed something markedly separate; a warmth what might have felt like, if any of them could remember such a thing, an embrace. Something decidedly more... attainable. Within reach.

His was a spirit what was close and bright and beautiful and to Hastur and Dagon it was all too similar as to what an ordinary human might have felt if they were to walk down the street and see a swimsuit model go swanning past. Something about him was a little bit... different to that of his Heavenly counterparts. He possessed an unmistakeable draw, a pull, a... magnetism.

He smelt nice, too. His Celestial scent and his human scent. For a good half a minute, Hastur and Dagon just stood there, blinking torpidly at him whilst treading water in the field of his demulcent aura; soaking it all in like a couple of Vitamin D deprived basement dwelling hermits. Which, if one cared to split hairs, they technically were.

Aziraphale, as you can imagine, quickly tired of this.

"There's nothing at all respectful about what you are doing!" He exclaimed, glancing about so as to be certain that no one else had picked up on the strangeness of the situation. Fortunately, it seemed, the other guests weren't paying them any the mind. "If this pertains to the... whatever it is that my lot-" He raised his eyes briefly towards the 'Heaven's' in reference to this. "- and _your_ lot have to discuss with Crowley and myself, then you needn't bother with heckling us. We made a time to meet with Michael and Uriel earlier in the day. They were supposed to have been in contact with you so as to pass along the message."

He was like... honey given Celestial form. The warm glow of a fire that would, for whatever reason, not burn you should you drift too close. Hastur and Dagon found themselves in fact moving those one or two steps closer; their eyes so strange and so gooey that Aziraphale found himself taking a good swooping step backwards so as to get out of swinging (and smelling) range.

"If... if you are attempting to intimidate me... then I feel I should warn you that I am entirely prepared to defend myself." Aziraphale resisted the urge to retract the umbrella and hold it out like a fencing foil. He would put up a fight if required, but would rather wait and see what was on offer before drenching his entire smart suit in rain water and having to sit through the ceremony in squishy trousers.

Dagon gave herself a mental shake, aware of the shifting in the angel's energy levels. She had received no information from their counterparts but that meant nothing, really. Unlike the angels of Heaven, demons did not have their own portable telecommunications devices and were required to speak to one another through way of media transmissions. She would need to find a radio and check in.

For both demons had little doubt that the Principality had been telling them the truth. Angel's could be a screwy bunch, but they weren't given over to flights of fancy; of which the falsifying of information certainly pertained. They were far too boring and anal retentive, for that.

"Uh... we, um... we didn't mean to bother you." Hastur garbled and then looked stupefied with himself for saying it in the first place. What was this odd feeling welling up inside of him? _Remorse?_ And something worse still. Something ancient. Historic. So historic, it took him much longer by which to figure out the nature of what it was.

Nervous.

He felt _nervous._

"We just... we were intended to make a secondary attempt. If the angels, um..." Dagon paused, swallowed past a lump that had formed in her throat. _What the Heaven was going on?_ "If they... if they missed you at the... shop."

"Well. They did not. We have set a time and I suggest that you check in with them." Aziraphale glanced over his shoulder and gave an urgent flutter of his hand to the pair of oddly dressed demons. "And quickly, now. Before Crowley gets back. Heaven knows how he will react seeing you both here. It is not an occasion on which I will tolerate your further intruding."

"We'll be off then." Hastur replied, feeling far the more motivated to abide by the angel's demands then he could ever have imagined himself to be.

He hitched up the hem of his dress, following Dagon out through the front gates of the funeral home and off towards the nearby alley in which they could secunder their bodies back to Hell with lesser chance of being caught by a wandering human eye.

The rain was cold. But they noticed it a lot more, with every step they took which drew them further from the grounds of the funeral home. Shadows seemed to creep back in around the borders of their souls; shrinking and pinching out that tentatively accommodated sensation of light and warmth.

"Cinnamon." Hastur said, after a couple of minutes or so of walking in silence. Dagon glanced up at him. "The angel. Cinnamon. Smelt like. ...Sort of."

Hastur didn't rate much in the human world. But he liked the bakeries. One of the few things he had always enjoyed when coming to earth (apart from the drinking, the smoking and the killing) was the smell which came from the workroom of a human bakery. He never felt hungry, but the scent of bread and pastries and baked goods... it was... comforting, somehow.

He had once bothered himself with the sampling of what the baker human had referred to as a 'cinnamon roll'. He hadn't minded it at all. But the taste, he felt, was always secondary to the smell.

The Principality had smelled of this very thing. Of cinnamon. Of a bakers shop, first thing in the morning; when the dawn had just barely broken.

Dagon pulled a face, disagreeing. "He didn't smell of bloody cinnamon. Was a clean smell. Kind of like... snow."

The first time Dagon had been required to go to earth, it had been snowing. It was 785 BCE in what was then known as _Bearrocscir_ , located in South East England. She had been forced to shelter in a small, bespoke cabin during a rather frigid night; in which the surmounting snowfall had risen to meet the window eaves by morning.

When cracking open the front door, the frame splintered a path through the snow what had gathered on the garden path. It had its own certain sort of smell. And for a demon who was so accustomed to filth and dark and slime, this clean, glistening white was fragile and virtuous. And especially tasty when, in later years, she realized you could add fruit syrup to it.

"You're barkers." Hastur appraised kindly, being the sensitive sort that he was. "Cinnamon. Nothing surer."

"Bollocks. Making stuff up in your head, you are."

The demons paused a moment to look at one another; acknowledging, albeit reluctantly, that though they were creatures espoused of lies, this was a rare moment in which they were both speaking the truth.

That the things they had smelled, whilst wallowing in the strange angel's presence, was quite as true for one, as it had been for the other.

Which begged the question; how could the Principality smell like one thing to one person and something entirely different, to another?

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks for reading, everyone :) If you are enjoying the story, I would very much love to know why! Please feel free to drop me a comment, if you feel comfortable doing so. And/or give that kudos button a kick in the human testicles!
> 
> Also, I now have a twitter account! Actually... I've had it for some time... but I never used it :P But I'm using it now, just to do silly little daily updates about my work on the fic. Sort of like a diary or a journal.
> 
> If you want to check in on me there, chat, or ask questions about the story or... whatever you like, you can find me under @madammortis :) Being as green around social media as I am, I have like NO followers. Please try and not judge me too harshly, if you choose to drop in. I did only just start using it XD
> 
> Thank you as always for your company my infernal darlings! I shall be attempting to get these edited chapters out more quickly, because I have new stuff I am super excited to share!
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	34. Or, in which a demon further drifts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "A long time ago, someone once told me that all of our lives are like clay on a potters wheel. And the people we meet will place their hands to that life and contribute to shaping it, in some form or another." Crowley held up his hands as though taking hold of that metaphorical clay between them. "Some might leave as much an impact as a passing graze. Others, a fingerprint or a indenture that is never smoothed out. And then there are those special persons who invest their time in truly giving shape to the pot, the cup or the plate what you might become. I only knew Gretchen two months, but in those two months, she gave shape to a part of me what has so long been left untouched. And for that, I am grateful."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: In my head, I always referred to the chapter that this subdivision came from as the 'cursed chapter'. It was where the length of each chapter became far too long and it was just too heavy handed for most people to trudge through, I believe. And understandably so. Even now, having divided, edited and trimmed like a beast, I still worry it's going to put people off. That being said, I still love it for what it is. A demonstration of Crowley's drifting ever further into the human condition, much as Aziraphale demonstrates in later chapters. For that reason, I feel it is important. Hopefully, you guys won't be too horribly bored :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 13th of April, 1:30pm~** _

_**Clarkson Funeral Home, Suburban London** _

No one enjoys a funeral. You would be considered rather the morally compromised piece of shit if you did.

But they can be cathartic in their way. A chance to celebrate and honour the life and accomplishments of a beloved person. To look over old photos and titter at favourite anecdotes and hoist a pint to the good times (considered the more appropriate at the reception, but one digresses).

A funeral for someone you cared for, Crowley was fast discovering, was a much sadder event than television had ever led him to believe.

The chapel had been beautifully decked out, thanks to Aziraphale's fastidious efforts. The flower arrangements had cost a small fortune, as they had been predominately comprised of roses (being Gretchen's favourite) but between the two of them they had more than enough money to cover such expenses. The room smelt splendid as a result and the adornments were every bit quite as lovely as they were appropriately reverential.

Crowley had selected the picture of Gretchen to be blown up and placed on display by the casket. It had been in her younger years and she had always been very insistent on Crowley looking at it when he had been working with her. It was a picture she had been most proud of. Before the cataracts had robbed her of her sight and when the arthritis had not yet taken such fierce hold of her joints. When she could do her own hair without pain and see in the mirror how her hairstyle and makeup came together. In her own words, she proclaimed to have looked _'fierce'_ in the photograph.

Crowley had always considered her 'fierce', in every respect of the word. But he understood her feelings on the matter. The photograph was the same one on the front cover of the service programs; all of which Aziraphale had painstakingly laboured over with the Funeral Director so as to put together the Order of Service.

Gretchen's open casket was set upon the pulpit. The director had done a good job with preparing her, Crowley had to admit. Well, in so far as that she still looked very much dead, but she did not look _grisly_ dead; which was to say she looked far more alive than most of his Hell based former brethren on even their best day.

Crowley and Rita had both worked together to pick out Gretchen's outfit. There was a blue dress that she had been particularly fond of ('Why you even care? Can't even see what you look like in it', Crowley had once teased her) black shoes and a gold necklace which had been bequeathed to her by Alfred before his death. Crowley had assisted with dressing her, which hadn't disturbed him quite as much as he supposed it might have done with most humans.

It was still a little jarring. Angel and demon bodies didn't just sort of linger around after spiritual respiration, not the way that humans did. _Cold meat,_ he had thought at one point, having been surprised by the icy temperature of Gretchen's skin. The heaviness of her leg as he had lifted it, to assist with sliding her stockings on. She would have hated it, more the likely and given him a smack behind the ear for his efforts. He had half expected it at any moment and felt more the disappointed to have finished the task and for Gretchen to still by laying there, just as cold and as dead as she had been from the outset.

Aziraphale supported Crowley with walking down the isle of the chapel. The soles of Crowley's feet were stinging as though a colony of fire ants had taken up residency in his fancy new shoes. He was doing his utmost to maintain a level of calm and cool composure, but this was of course Crowley and he was a customarily expressive creature and this was true even without his glasses to provide some manner of a smoke screen. He clenched his teeth and winced with every step taken. It may have been a non-denominational locale but it was nominational enough to hurt like Hell.

Aziraphale advised that if anyone took notice of his discomfort, then he would simply inform them that Crowley was having troubles with his haemorrhoids. Thinking that this was the singularly most unstylish thing of which he could stand accused, Crowley had already gotten in whilst the getting was good, and informed Alice that if he was walking funny it was simply as a result of Aziraphale having 'comforted' him a little too vigorously the night before. He had not of course made Aziraphale aware of the alliteration and had been forced to stifle an inappropriate snicker when Alice had flashed the angel an approving thumbs up, to which Aziraphale, likely having assumed it to be in relation to the funeral preparation, returned the gesture with interest.

They had taken their seats (Crowley easing down as though he were a woman in the latter parts of labour) and weathered their way through the preliminaries of the service; with the funeral director reading out the information what had been provided to him by the funeral home and woven into sentimental statutes by way of Aziraphale's poetic mind. Crowley did his best not to squiggle and squirm but it was difficult when it felt as though bugs were biting him on the bum. He tried sitting on his hands a couple of times, but the itchy feeling what lay siege to his palms was even worse than copping it to the buttocks. He was tempted to climb into Aziraphale's lap at one point and see whether this made any difference, but figured it was the sort of thing what might be deemed inappropriate for a funeral service.

After what felt like far too long belabouring a point (much as Crowley cared to belabour anything where Gretchen was concerned) the director opened up the floor (mike, whatever) to whoever wished to say a few words about the 'dearly departed'. Rita took the stand first, speaking about the day Gretchen first came to the Grange and expositing on a number of fond stories what had occurred during her time there.

When Rita had wrapped up and plonked her way down off of the pulpit, Crowley hesitated right in the moment where he felt he should have otherwise been in control. He should have been all too eager, to climb up off of his now very raw arse and limp on up to the front of the chapel and say the words he had been planning to say. But a glance at Gretchen's open casket threw him for a loop and that unfamiliar, sinking sensation dragged his breath down into the gallows of his body.

For what felt to him a ridiculous and obvious length of time, he sat there, staring with his sore, bleary eyes at the front of the room and doing nothing more productive than preventing dust from taking up residence on the seat of the pew.

Aziraphale, obviously sensing his struggle (more the likely for want of the fact that he was supposed to have shifted out of his seat a good thirty seconds earlier and so far hadn't budged an inch) squeezed his hand (he had been holding it the entire time, Crowley only just realized) and leaned close to whisper in his ear.

_"Would you like for me to walk you up there?"_ He asked, in a tone of voice so sensitive it immediately brought Crowley back to earth with the same effectiveness as someone clanging together a set of symbols beside his ears.

"No. No, I'm fine." He sniffed, rubbing his thumb once briefly over Aziraphale's knuckles, before releasing his hand and easing up out of his seat. It all felt very strange and unfamiliar. He felt as though every set of eyes in the room were on him and it should not have been a thing that mattered. Not when Gretchen was up there. Dead in a box.

Crowley glanced over at her as he passed on his way to the pulpit.

It really was a lovely dress. She looked lovely in it.

More lovely when she wasn't just held together by stitches, cotton, methanol and formaldehyde.

Her brain wasn't even in her head. The place where all those clever quips, snide remarks and funny stories had come from had been scraped out of her skull and cast aside.

Like a piece of rotten meat.

Crowley had seen where they had done it. The funeral home director had shown him; shown the thick stitches in the back of her skull. Had explained, very professionally and sensitively the process he had used, so as he (Crowley) would not be frightened to come across any of these things in the process of dressing her.

Crowley wasn't frightened. He had seen countless dead bodies over the years. Gretchen's was far from the first.

Far from it...

_But the stitches..._

They hadn't been there when she was alive. Of course not. They _shouldn't_ have been there. They were much too thick. Too awful.

They were there because her brain had been removed.

Crowley stalled by the pulpit, reached out a hand to steady himself. The world spun. Something had shifted into an unfamiliar gear within his mind.

An olfactory memory drifted in on the tides of his emotions like a bottle containing a message. And the message was a piece of paper. Burned almost beyond the point of recognition.

Parchment.

_Burning parchment._

He felt a hand on his back, right there between the shoulder blades and thought that it was Aziraphale. But it was the funeral director, who was giving him almost the very same patient and kindly look of which the angel would likely have offered in turn.

"Are you all right?" He asked and Crowley was suddenly envisaged by the desperate urge to just give up on it all and proclaim that 'No. No he was not all right. Because things that you put care into should never just up and disappear.'

A car that you had cherished and laboured over for the better part of ninety years should never blow up before you very eyes.

A bookstore you had spent so many the hundreds of years sharing ever the more infinitesimal number of good times and good cheer, should never just go and catch fire and burn to the ground.

An angel who you loved more than the very life that you lived should never just go and disappear and leave you alone in a world what was suddenly colder and crueller and emptier than it ever was when he had been a part of it.

A person who you cared for, who you wheeled around and talked with and helped to dress and to nurture and to share and to pass the moments with, should never end up cold and stiff in a box with stitches in the back of their head.

But of course, Crowley said none of it. To make himself the focus of any of this, was not at all his style. He had promised to give Gretchen a proper send off and blessed if his own bizarre crisis of morality was going to go and get in the way of it.

And so, with a poised response of 'I'm fine' and a stiff smile to the director, Crowley straightened his tie, heaved his stinging, aching feet up to rest by the pulpit and set the long stemmed rose down, where the frame of the lectern would prevent it from rolling free.

He took a piece of paper from inside of his jacket pocket, right alongside where the bulge of his keys were currently residing. He cast a look towards Aziraphale, who gave him an eternally fond, supportive look; which was surprisingly mirrored by both Alice and Rita, who sat on the pew alongside him. Quite suddenly, Crowley had a feeling of being ever so much a part of _something_ ; like a bead in one of those do-it-yourself necklace kits people sometimes paddled on commercial television and which usually resulted in someone's child ending up in the emergency room with something that ought not to be in their nose _up_ their nose.

It was very sentimental and very annoying and so Crowley rather took what he needed so as to continue moving forwards and unfurled the piece of paper, focusing on the spidery writing he had more the likely penned with a couple of drinks under his snake belt.

"So, uh..." He took a moment to clear his throat. A few women gathered in the chapel seemed to think that his choking up was adorable and tilted their heads as though he were a cute puppy paddling its little legs above the bath tub before it had even touched the water. "Just wanted to say first and foremost, thank you to the uh... anonymous private citizen for pulling all of this together in such a short space of time. I'm sure old Gretch would have loved it. 'Specially the roses."

Aziraphale gave the very slightest, infinitesimal nod of acknowledgement; failing to notice how Alice had turned and hitched her unconvinced brows in his direction.

Crowley took a moment to compose himself. This was where things got a little difficult. Though he would die before telling a soul, he had managed to go through a half a piece of toilet paper just practicing this speech in his bedroom mirror. And much as he would have liked to have pretended that it was hay fever, the demon had never had an allergy a day in his life.

"I, uh... I only knew Gretchen two months. The two months since I started working here, that is. ...She was a good sort. Rough edges wrapped around a... a kind heart." He looked down a moment, as another pitch of emotion rose up against him. Why was this so hard? Two months was... it was chicken feed.

"I got to know her pretty well; a natural side effect of being the only one around able to speak French, I guess. And she was the sort of person who I like to imagine my mother might have been like; tough, no holds bar, funny. And caring, in her own ham-fisted way. Called a spade an industrial earth mover, that woman."

He laughed a little, genuine enjoyment for the memory that his notes pertained to.

"I remember we were chatting just a day before she passed and there are boundaries in place and all that, so I never really brought up stuff that was going on in my personal life. But she always knew when I might have been feeling sad, even when I was doing my best to bottle it up. Which, lets face it, I have an advantage; she was blind as a bat."

Most of the person's gathered in the chapel were employees of the Grange and so they shared in the soft, affectionate joke; all perhaps understanding that this was very much in line with what Gretchen herself would have enjoyed.

"But you see, it... it made the fact that she picked up on it all the more impressive. I always told her not to fuss; that I'm a worker, she's a client and that she didn't need to be worrying about any of the shit that was going on in my life. And she said..."

He paused again, swallowing as something rose up in the back of his throat. That blessed pinch of earthly emotion again. Why was it so persistent?

"She said: "I ain't got anyone else to worry about. Might as well fuss over you."' He chuckled a little. "Talk about stubborn."

He focused now properly on the piece of paper; on the thing that he had written there. Took a few quite unnecessary moments with which to flatten out the wrinkles that the folds had pressed into the once flat surface.

"I've been scouring the Internet and rifling through some of my partner's biggest and dustiest old books the last couple of days, looking for something meaningful to say about life and death and love, all that stuff. Various poems and allegory's in French and English, all that. Nothing really seemed to resonate. Then I came across this. It's... probably going to sound a bit silly but it, uh... it's from that musical _Wicked_."

Aziraphale gave a little internal titter at hearing this. Shouldn't have surprised him. Crowley had always had a soft spot for musicals.

And it could have been worse. Could have been a quote from the _Exorcist_. Or, God forbid, his new favourite movie _Ghost Shark_.

"It sort of sums up the experience of what getting to know someone like Gretchen was for me, personally." Crowley cleared his throat again, pulling into himself every tiny, piece of resolute strength he had at his disposal. This was the part what came most difficult and most usually where the toilet paper made its appearance.

_"Like a comet pulled from orbit, as it passes a sun. Like a stream that meets a boulder, halfway through the wood. Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good."_

Crowley sought out Aziraphale's gaze. Hoped that the angel knew, that part of the very reason the words had resonated so deeply with him, was because they made ever so much sense out of the journey the two of them had embarked upon together. He could see, from the soft, plaintive look in his lovers eyes, that the words were making the very same mark.

He folded the paper and returned it to the inset of his jacket pocket. Some of the women in the gathering were dabbing at their eyes with sleeves and handkerchiefs alike. A select few looked every bit as likely to attempt to ravish him at the reception. Crowley paid neither much reaction mind. He still had a little more what he wished to say, before he could go right on ahead and ease his stinging, nettle filled feet back down off of the pulpit.

"A long time ago, someone once told me that all of our lives are like clay on a potters wheel. And the people we meet will place their hands to that life and contribute to shaping it, in some form or another." Crowley held up his hands as though taking hold of that metaphorical clay between them. "Some might leave as much an impact as a passing graze. Others, a fingerprint or a indenture that is never smoothed out. And then there are those special persons who invest their time in truly giving shape to the pot, the cup or the plate what you might become. I only knew Gretchen two months, but in those two months, she gave shape to a part of me what has been so far left untouched. And for that, I am grateful."

With what needed saying having been said, Crowley gave a conclusive nod and picked up the rose from the lectern. As he stepped one foot down off of the dais, some members of the gathering, including Aziraphale, started to clap for him, to which he flashed an immediate and ostensibly reproachful look.

"Don't _clap_ , I didn't get up here and do a dance for... goodness sake."

An appreciative chuckle rose up from the somewhat light hearted response but Crowley still wasn't much concerned with that. He crossed over to where Gretchen's casket was set. Her face was flattened out a little; possessing nothing of the natural liveliness it had when she had been... well, alive.

The director had done the best job he could have done.

Perhaps if Crowley had done a better job, the director might not have needed to do his.

It was the conscious consideration of this thought that just about toppled him backwards. The acknowledgement that he in some way felt _responsible_.

Oh no, but that was... ridiculous. There was nothing he could have done to prevent Gretchen's passing. Nothing he could have done which might have hastened it.

But then...

_"There are reasons why food is blander in places such as this."_   
_"... heart conditions..."_   
_"... rich food can exacerbate..."_

He had _changed the food_.

Crowley raised Gretchen's cold hands and slid the rose in underneath them. They rested upon her chest and now the rose rested above the cavity in which her heart might otherwise have been.

The heart which killed her.

_The heart I weakened._

"Au revoir, armour." He said, passing his palm over her cold forehead. A palm that was shaking.

_I'm sorry. I think I might have killed you. And I'm sorry._   
_I'm so sorry._

He turned and limped back to his seat, so desolate in his thoughts that he barely noticed just how painful and raw his feet were. Aziraphale smiled softly all the while, a smile Crowley knew full well that he was undeserving of and took his hand as Crowley eased back down into the seat beside him. The nettles jabbing themselves back up into his buttocks with much the same tenacity as they had earlier demonstrated.

"That was beautiful, darling."

"Ah, shut it." Crowley hissed, turning his knees off to the side to allow Alice to squeeze on past and head up towards the pulpit. Aziraphale reached into his inside pocket.

"Do you want my handkerchief?"

"No, I don't want your handkerchief! I'm _not_ crying!" Crowley insisted, nonchalantly wiping his fingers up under his eyes, which were welling so considerably that the room had turned to nothing but vague blurs as though seen through the bottom of a swimming pool. "Just these blessed contacts..."

It wasn't the contacts. And it was far the less being simply and naturally aggrieved by the passing of someone Crowley had come to care for in the line of duty.

It was a somewhat unfamiliar and ever the more destructive of emotions.

Guilt.

Guilt what might never be satisfactorily assuaged. For Crowley could never know, certainly and beyond reason of a doubt, whether his contributions towards improving the residents meals, had weakened Gretchen's heart enough so as to result in her death.

He had never put much stock in how humans could profess to ever actually hating themselves. But he was starting to get some idea.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I've been considering as to whether I should be looking for a beta for this story, but still can't quite make my mind up. It would be a hell of a job, but if anyone has any interest in taking up the task, please let me know :) Perhaps I could do with a firmer hand on the editing side of things. You can encourage me, such as Crowley encourages his plants! "WRITE - BETTER!!!" XD
> 
> Thanks as always for joining me, my darlings! I'm going to try and upload every couple of days, so as to get around to the new content as quickly as possible. If you have any thoughts on the piece, feel free to let me know why, drop a kudos or slam a bookmark in this bad boy. All of which are greatly appreciated :)
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	35. Or, in which Crowley faces off with a baby.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That very same smell which was brand new. That smell what was innocence and unknowing and trusting and hopefulness personified.
> 
> That smell what was poised on the very brink of a waiting world, as ripe with potential and possibility as an apple, nourished and fat and ready for the hand what would reach up and pluck it free from the safety of its branch.
> 
> Apples would wither to nothing if not plucked from the branch.
> 
> But they were devoured if they were...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hey again, everyone! Thanks as always to all of you who are reading; it makes the journey far the less lonely with good company :) And of course, extra special thanks goes out to all those gorgeous beans who take a bit of time out of their busy days to kudos, bookmark and to comment! Believe you me; I no longer write in the hope that I will receive comments, but I indisputably treasure every single one that I receive and they do in fact keep the writing fuel burning harder and faster! So if you are enjoying the story, please feel free to throw some fuel on the fire! I promise, it does light a firecracker under my arse!
> 
> Alternatively, if you ever want to chat about the story or ask a question, I keep a very lame, private twitter; which is pretty much my version of a wimpy kids diary. You can find me @madammortis.
> 
> And thus, another update, my dears! Hope that you enjoy!

**~X~**

* * *

**_~Saturday - 13th of April, 3:55pm~_ **

**_Funeral Reception- Some R.S.L, Suburban London..._ **

"It was lovely, what you said, about us being like clay on a potters wheel. Who was it what said that to you, originally?"

"I don't know. Some wanker." Crowley sipped from his drink. So far as parties went, Gretchen's funeral reception was shaping up to be one Heaven of a downer. People milling, talking in quiet, solemn sounding voices, nibbling on the corners of delicate triangle shaped sandwiches.

No one who was there had really known her, of course. No long term family members; with the exception of the fake as reality T.V show women's lip department niece and husband, who looked just about as out of place as Crowley and Aziraphale.

 _At least I actually cared about her,_ Crowley thought, feeling as though vinegar was flooding the channels of his mind. He shifted on the wooden bar stool, spinning back about so as to face Aziraphale properly. Better so as to focus on him, rather than let the bitterness of his thoughts get the better of him.

"Do you feel as though..." Aziraphale looked a little bashful for what it was he intended to ask; tapping the base of his glass against the countertop. The local R.S.L did not have a great variety in the respect of single malt but the _Singleton Dufftown_ was going down just fine. " _I_ have helped to shape you in some meaningful way?"

Crowley stared at him, astonished by the fact that Aziraphale felt the need to ask such an offensively rhetorical question. Although it did seem to be very much a question to which a curt 'Of course, you idiot' hardly seemed appropriate.

"Sweetheart, you've pretty much been solely responsible for shaping every blessed inch of this ramshackle old pot." He gestured down the length of a body which Aziraphale could hardly have ever described as 'ramshackle' on even its worst day. "There's not an inch of my soul that hasn't got one of your fingerprints all but ground into it."

Aziraphale might have felt a little ashamed of himself for fishing quite as obviously as he had but he wasn't particularly a well behaved angel these days. As such, he happily accepted the reassurance.

"Oh... thank you. That's ever so sweet."

Crowley grunted dismissively, embarrassed such as he always was by the angel giving him that sweetly, disabling look. To detract from it, he glanced about the room, admiring the modest, yet still pleasing to the eye arrangements. "You really did a great job getting all this sorted out."

"As I have continually stated all week long, I just made a couple of phone calls. You made all the decisions." Aziraphale might not be predisposed to praise but he hardly felt it at all necessary to be continually thanked for work that he had barely a hand in. Particularly when said work had been executed solely and singularly with the purpose of supporting Crowley.

Aziraphale cared very greatly about doing the right thing. It had, for the greater part of his existence, been his sole reason for... existing.

These days he was finding that he cared a great deal more, however, for doing right by Crowley.

Which was turning out to be rather the sticky wicket, so to speak.

"You were on the phone like twenty-four seven!" The demon insisted, quite as ill prepared in the foregoing of the gratitude as Aziraphale was reticent in the receiving of it. "You really went above and beyond."

"Well, I saw how much it meant to you." Aziraphale said, quite honestly. And then, because Crowley looked to be on the verge of either calling him out or (Heaven forbid) reproaching him, quickly added: "Not to mention that it hardly seemed fair for your dear Gretchen not to have a send off what was worthy of her. I'm sure she would have loved it."

"Knowing her she probably would have just gone-" And here, Crowley wedged his tongue between his front teeth and produced a short, sharp raspberry. He knew very well what Gretchen was like and she was hardly what you would have called the sentimental type. "But that's the thing, isn't it? Funerals aren't for the dead, much as we like to think we're doing them justice. Really just trying to make ourselves feel better, ay?" He tapped his finger against the bar top to get the attendants attention. "Same again."

"Still a mark of respect, I feel. To go to the effort." Aziraphale smiled, reaching across to cup his palm to the back of Crowley's hand, giving it an affectionate little jiggle. "I'm very proud of you, you know."

"Yeah, yeah, all right. No need to rub it in." Crowley took a sip from his now restocked drink and then cocked his head, taking note of a familiar and very thick Irish accent what had made its sudden home in the R.S.L. He swivelled about in his seat, confirming his suspicions. "Well, would you look at that..."

"Hmm?"

"Jeanie just rocked up. ...She's the reason I moved to part-time." He added, because Aziraphale looked momentarily confused as to just who 'Jeanie' was supposed to have been. "She's on maternity leave."

"Oh, yes, of course." Aziraphale replied, turning about in his own seat and then immediately sliding down off of it. The reason being that Jeanie and her partner had clearly spotted Crowley across the room and were making their way towards the bar with the determination of a steam engine. Jeanie was carrying a stout, white bundle in her arms, which Crowley supposed to have been the baby; given that the bassinet which her partner was carrying, was empty. At least, one could only hope that this was the given arrangement and that the baby wasn't lying on a bench in a takeaway shop somewhere and Jeanie was instead carting along a steaming bag of fresh chips with which to share with her fellow mourners.

"Wasn't sure you were going to make it." Crowley said in way of greeting. Aziraphale turned just enough so as to glance the palm of his hand against Crowley's leg, encouraging him to stand so as to properly greet the pair. He did so, but not without plenty of groaning to intersperse the transition.

"Of course I was going to make it! I've known Gretchen years, I'd never miss the opportunity to pay my respects!" Jeanie got up on her tip toes, managing to loose one hand from about the baby (what favoured Crowley with a somewhat impertinent look, he observed) and wrap her arm about Crowley's shoulders. "You remember Elise, right?"

Where Jeanie was sort of bright and peppy and colourful in her manner and dress sense, her partner Elise presented as the one being considerably more grounded in her approach to most ...everything. She had short, no nonsense style hair, two practical studs in the lobes of each ear and a predilection, Crowley remembered, for straight leg jeans, fitted t-shirts and boots that he himself had taken to admiring for the better half of one evening over work drinks.

She had a both dark and dry sense of humour, which Crowley found to be very amusing, as he too shared an appreciation for it. They had kept one another voraciously entertained from what little he could recall; to the point that their quips had progressed so far beyond what any reasonable person might call 'the line' that it had all but faded into their rear view mirrors.

"'Course. She played Keep 'em off with my car keys over drinks one night." Crowley said and was a little surprised that Elise stepped forward and gave him a hug as well. It wasn't really in her style, he remembered but supposed that this was the sort of situation where people felt that bodily contact was somewhat required. "And, as you might have already guessed, this is Alex."

Jeanie looked as though she had been bouncing up and down in her own skin, just waiting for the moment Crowley saw fit to meander up on the introduction. "Yes, I saw the Facebook status! Yay for No longer complicated!" She gave that giddy, sort of self-mocking laugh that energetic people are so prone to resorting to when they realize that their own energy is carrying them away. Elise just shook her head a little, to which Crowley felt something of a familial bond. It was sort of like watching _Hamlet_ in the company of Aziraphale and trying to decide whether his enthusiasm was amusing so much as just plain embarrassing. "So nice to meet you finally, Alex!"

"Lovely to meet you too." Aziraphale enthused with about equal parts delight and good cheer, giving each woman in turn a hug what even appeared to reduce Elise into reluctant, feel-good goop. He also gave each a brief kiss on the cheek, just so as there could be no question as to who the true gentleman of the pair was.

Jeanie, naturally, was all over that. "Oh my God, Alice was right! You do give the best hugs!" She fairly much moaned, returning Aziraphale's embrace with interest enough to splinter several perfectly good ribs. Crowley did his part in espousing offense.

"What's wrong with my hugs?" He said, in a tone which suggested that he might have in some way been dismayed at the thought of not being in the running for best 'hugger in the universe.' Crowley, of course, was not even in the category of 'happy just to be nominated'.

"Well, they're shit and noncommittal." Jeanie replied truthfully. Well, truthfully so far as anyone who wasn't Aziraphale was concerned. "It's like trying to hug a boney tree which whips you with its branches while you're doing it."

"Trees don't have bones." Crowley smarmily corrected, whilst at the same time approving of the metaphor as being for the most part accurate. Though he never went so far as to attempt to 'strike' people when they went to put their arms around him, he had often wanted to and it was an urge impended alone by societal expectations. And Aziraphale's more the likely disapproval.

"Congratulations to the both of you, by the by." Aziraphale was saying, having gracefully bypassed what was shaping up to be a very pointless exchange concerns 'trees' and pathological distrust of other creatures and their desire to wrap themselves up in your personal space. "Your baby is absolutely perfect."

Crowley wasn't at all convinced that the baby was in fact 'perfect'. So far as babies went, he supposed it was all right. It had the same chubby cheeks, bubbly flecked lips and perpetually constipated countenance that he might otherwise have attributed to Winston Churchhill. Who looked, much to him, like every newborn baby he had ever seen.

Why did they always have to look so disapproving? He wondered, frowning at the baby who had, in turn, been glaring up at him as though aware of every, single diabolic feat he had ever enacted on Hell's behalf and the fact that he was planning, at the nearest available opportunity, to trick Aziraphale into watching _Ghost Shark 2: Urban Jaws._

To be fair... this was one which he did deserve to be judged for.

"Oh, cheers." Jeanie said, with that ever so fond nuance people preserve for when their children were being praised. As though they had had a direct hand in the child's so called 'perfectness'. "She's perfect now that there are other people around. Tonight she'll be making up for it."

"And what is her name?"

"Benson." Elise said, reaching over and using the bib what was sanctioned about the baby's neck to dab some of the accumulative dribble off of her mouth.

Aziraphale could not have looked more the pleased with the name, then if he had come up with it himself.

"How lovely." He said, tilting his head a moment and peering into the secondary space in that special way that angel's had. He knew that the baby was healthy and contented and just about as regular as a baby could be expected, but it was still good manners to ask the questions all the same. "And she's healthy?"

"Oh, yes. Very healthy. Got all ten fingers and toes."

"Sleeping well?"

"Awake a couple of times during the nights. But not too bad. She doesn't cry a whole heck of a lot."

"How is she eating?"

"You don't need to ask that." Crowley hissed, very concerned that he was just about to be served an entire confronting diatribe about the tribulations of breast feeding and rather preferring not to be informed on the subject. Jeanie, sensing his unease, gave a small, conciliatory laugh.

"We're bottle feeding, Cumquat. Besides," She petted the side of his arm, good naturedly. "I wouldn't wanna go scaring you with the thought of yucky female breasts."

"Good." Crowley stated, happy to go along with her on that. He'd had breasts himself in the past, when presenting as a woman and they hadn't been frightening at the time. Rather just inconvenient. And heavy. And often painful at that certain time of the month, but then he had been distracted by any other number of horrendous female based 'going's on' so as to pay the state of his breasts much attention.

Being a male, he had to admit, was world's simpler. He sincerely doubted he had it in him to live as a woman for any extended length of time. He was already a naturally cranky creature and the hormones what came part and parcel with being a female rendered him into a monster of such cantankerous composition that Aziraphale had taken to avoiding him for the better part of a quarter-century.

Which then of course led to a whole other series of problems; such as weight gain from eating too much sweet food, obsessing over what he could possibly have done wrong and _why_ wasn't Aziraphale answering his letters and why did his blessed boobs hurt all the time and _why_ couldn't he do _anything_ with his hair and **who left their Satan blessed clothes lying on the bathroom floor?!** (The fact that Crowley lived alone and there was only one of one option as to who could have left their clothes lying about was lost to the illogical oversaturation of estrogen).

No, Crowley thought. Women were exemplary creatures and it was simply same strange, sick, cosmic twist of fate that they were forced to share the same planet as their lesser counterparts: males.

"Would either of you like a hold?" He drifted back into reality just in time to hear Jeanie offload this patently obvious threat. "Probably a good chance while she's out of it."

"Oh, that would be wonderful, my dear." Aziraphale said, all but a quiver with the notion of bundling nearly-new life into his angelic arms. "But I do feel that Anthony should have the honours first."

Crowley made no bones about his reluctance to interact in any meaningful way with a human that was more delicate than a chinchilla's belly hair. He had a look on his face which would not have been considered out of place if repositioned over a compost bin.

"Uhhh... nah, I don't... I mean, I might do something wrong. Little baby, you know..." He pursed his lips, feeling the point was made simply his referencing the thing that they were attempting to foist into his very unwilling arms. "-fairly breakable."

And smelly. And dribbly. And more the likely to vomit on my new suit, if given half a chance. Babies were cunning like that. It would more'n likely aim for the white of his shit, as well. No sense in wasting good vomit on the otherwise salvageable black of his jacket.

"Nonsense, big old soft touch like you." Jeanie all but purred, patently refusing to read between Crowley's rather firmly hewn lines. The baby had already commenced its docking procedure, being leveraged over towards Crowley in such a way which suggested that if he did not comply, then the child was most definitely going to end up in a heap upon the floor. Aziraphale was kind enough (for which Crowley would forever resent him) to take the glass out of the demon's hands, set it on the bar top and assist with the infants transfer. "Here you go. Just support her head."

There is a term what is used to describe the look of a frightened animals that is called 'whale-eyes'. It refers to the way in which the near entirety of the white surrounds the pupil; indicating increased levels of anxiety, fear and or shock. Crowley had this very same look on his face and might in fact have appeared more relaxed if found stock still in the path of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler.

He must have have blacked out a moment, because the next thing he was aware of, was the baby having been installed in his arms and Aziraphale was adjusting his 'bicep' so as to provide some (well rather lacking) support to the baby's head.

"Oh... yep. Okay. This is happening." Crowley observed, staring first at the baby and then at Aziraphale's rather amused, plainly vindictive expression and understood that this was the comeuppance he was due for having forced the angel to wade through _Ghost Shark._

Jeanie and Elise just stood there, smiling vapidly as though the scene was every bit as lovely as anything they had ever before seen. Crowley wasn't at all sure what to do. He'd never held a baby before. Not even the Anti-Christ. There had been a handy basket provided. Direct interaction had not been at all required and likely would not have been encouraged. He was rather relieved, in fact, when one of the other workers called out to Jeanie and made a harried gesture so as to invite her to join their little throng.

"Oh, do you mind?" Jeanie pointed towards the group, which included, Crowley noticed with annoyance, Esmée and Paul. They likely couldn't understand much of what was being said, but when did that ever stand in the way of insincere schmoozing? "Just give us a chance to do a meet and greet around the room. Been ages since I've seen everyone..."

"Of course." Aziraphale said, accommodatingly, smiling all the more genuinely at the look of distress that was unfurling across Crowley's face like the skin from the flesh of a ripe avocado. "Take your time. Everything's under control."

With a hastily proffered 'thank you', Jeanie and Elise wandered off to make the social rounds. Crowley was left, for the second time in a little over a decade, with the saddling of an infant he wanted next to nothing to do with. His distress was equalled, if not ostensibly overshadowed by Aziraphale's obvious entrancement with the child and he was beaming down at it with so much a bridling of love that it sheered off and lent a soft, warm cadence to the hearts of every person within the room.

"Ease up a bit, angel. You're jussst about glowing." Crowley hissed from the corner of his mouth. He sensed Aziraphale dialling his influence back a notch or two.

"Oh, yes. I do apologize. Got... carried away. You know."

Crowley jiggled the baby slightly. It did nothing whatsoever to improve the child's censorious countenance.

"So..."

"So..."

"Brand new human."

" _Very_ brand new human."

"... Hello brand new human." Crowley said. The brand new human continued to stare as though not entirely certain as to what to make of him. Crowley attempted to find some common interest with which to build a connection. Such things were important when interacting with humans.

"... How has your day been?"

The baby made a soft cooing noise. A bubble popped on the corner of its fat, rosy little lips.

"Seen any good movies?"

The baby shifted a little in its blanket. Farting, probably. Aziraphale, Crowley noticed, had his hand pressed gently to where the babies feet were likely located and was smiling to himself. He supposed the baby must have been pushing back against him, which seemed a very typical thing for Aziraphale to amuse himself with.

"... How about this whole Brexit thing, eh?"

The baby stopped shifting, bubbling and mewing and just stared at Crowley now in a sort of _'_ Really? This is the best you can do?' manner which made the demon feel a little self-conscious. Heaven, it was one thing to be judged by creatures you had been better acquainted with since the dawn of time. It was entirely another to earn the ire of a human what hadn't been on earth long enough to contribute much more than its nappy load to a landfill somewhere.

"... starting to feel like this is a very one sided conversation."

"Well, what do you expect?" Aziraphale said, trying without much success not to be wonderfully amused by the situation. Crowley looked about ready to melt down into his snake form and slither away at the first loud noise. "She's just a baby after all. They don't tend to have much to say about the state of world affairs."

Crowley's arms were getting a little sore (used to precious little asides from hefting the next drink) and he adjusted his hold so as to get more comfortable. He paused, raised his arms a second time. Feeling the scantness of the newborn's weight.

"It's so... small. ...Lucky for Jeanie, I guess."

"And _she_ has remarkable fashion sense." Aziraphale reached over and peeled back a portion of the white blanket. The baby was dressed in a white shirt, which was offset by a positively smashing pair of tiny overalls made from tartan material. Crowley rolled his eyes at the sight of it.

"You would say that. "Tartan is stylish" _._ " He moved his hand about so as to cup to the back of the baby's head a moment before settling it back to beneath her little bottom. "Its' head is so soft. It's so little. Anything could happen to it."

"Well, that's why _she_ has big humans." Aziraphale said, making good and certain to emphasize the she as he said it. Crowley had a sometimes very bad habit of referring to any living creature, what was not they themselves as 'It's'. Perhaps to keep some otherwise, much advised, emotional distance. "To take care of her. To protect her."

"Hmm. ... Like I protect you." Crowley said, looking at him. Aziraphale gave a fussy, unconvinced huff in response.

"I do think that _I_ tend to be the one protecting you most of the time."

Crowley near about choked himself in his rush to protest this cheeky assessment. "Excuse me?! This coming from the dopey angel what gets locked up in the Bastille because he popped into France for a bite to eat during a rebellion dressed like an Aristocrat? The angel what had to then be rescued by a certain demon, who, might I add, did not happen to be in the area at all, when said imprisonment occurred?"

It was an important distinction to make and rather charitable of him, really. Given the amount of times he had in fact come to Aziraphale's gormless rescue over the centuries.

Aziraphale, who was now giving Crowley a rather curious, sentimental look. A look which made the demon realize that in his annoyance, he had gone and been far too honest.

"You weren't?" Aziraphale asked, his voice so soft with temperate yearning it made Crowley feel sick in just about every way that a body could afford to feel sick.

"No, I'd just woken up from a fifty year nap." He begrudgingly acknowledged. He had told Aziraphale, back in the 1700's, that he had trotted himself over to France to see just what it was he had received a commendation for. The commendation had been the true part, but he'd never really had much interest in what it was that Hell saw fit to give him gold stars for. "Got wind of you somewhere over in France and figured, knowing what you're like, that I had best pop over and make certain you hadn't gone and gotten yourself caught up in some stupidity or another. Needless to say..."

"Yes, yes, all that being said," Aziraphale interjected, shelving this 'very important information' away for a time in which he was otherwise not attempting to establish a point. "I do believe that I tend to protect you on a smaller, though no less important level. I've saved you from any number of bar room brawls you have managed to land yourself in by way of a cheeky tongue. And I do recall having to burp you before."

"It was Christmas lunch. I was bloated."

"I know, dear."

"Sort of reminds me of when I first met you." Crowley gave the baby another slight jiggle, for which it appeared naturally unappreciative. "Had this overwhelming sense that somehow, someway you would end up getting yourself hurt." Aziraphale looked subtly insulted for the insinuation. "Not through any fault of your own. Just on account of being so well meaning. And a dickhead."

"As one tries not to be offended by that..." Aziraphale was cut off smartly at the pass by the intruding wail of a baby that was well past the point of tolerating Crowley's half-hearted hosting. Crowley, who looked to be on the verge of wetting himself at the eruption currently taking place between his arms.

"Uh oh. I did something wrong. It's crying. Aziraphale, what do I do?!"

"Well don't panic for a start." Aziraphale said, finding himself amused all over again. Perhaps it was not a terribly kind thing to admit, but he rather felt that he could have watched this going on for the better part of an hour. Crowley's panic was kind of enjoyable. "She's not going to explode."

"How do I make it stop?"

"Ah, well, for these things you see, there is a handy little button located just behind the shell of their ear, which turns the baby off."

Crowley glared at him. Glarefully.

"You _rock_ her, dear. Pet her head. Comfort her. Gently." He added as an afterthought. Who knew how Crowley might choose to interpret such things which might be considered common sense to those who weren't... well, demons.

Crowley rocked the baby with all the awkwardness you might have seen if his movements had been guided by a hapless game player who was three glasses in and kept missing the QTE sequences onscreen.

"There, there, small human. There, there." He attempted to soothe. The baby ignored his would be good-intentions (self-serving as they were) and continued to unabashedly squall her vexation to the would be attentions of a room of people who were starting to turn and take notice. Crowley felt a flush work its way up under his ears and onto his neck. He felt judged. "Aziraphale, why is it still crying?"

"Probably you bringing up that whole Brexit thing. It's a very troubling time for humans in this part of the world, so I gather." Aziraphale said, enjoying himself immensely. "Plus, the pound is down, you know."

"Oh, come on!"

"Because she's a baby, Crowley! That's what babies do on occasion! They find it difficult to express their needs in any other more meaningful way." He gave the demon a placating rub to the back, fancying he could just about feel the sweat pooling up underneath his suit jacket. "You should be able to relate."

Crowley snorted. "Please. I've got far more on my plate to deal with than this baby. You don't see me crying and throwing a hissy over it."

"I have seen it, actually."

"Hey." Crowley said to the baby. Firmly. Thinking it was about high time to try another tact. One in which he enjoyed the moderately more success with and was infinitely more familiar in the execution of. "'Bout time you learned that life is hard, kid. Toughen up!"

Aziraphale, recognizing the tone entirely for what it was, decided that the fun was well and truly over and now prompt intervention was required.

"Don't talk to her like you talk to your plants! Heaven above, just... hand her here." He gestured insistently and Crowley, with just about equal parts urgency, passed the baby over. The angel took her into the waiting crook of his arms as though they had been especially designed to accommodate her own tiny body specifically. He made a soft cooing noise; a noise which Crowley was entirely certain came not of his human body, but from that of his celestial spirit. He could feel it having an effect on him as well. Soothing, as though the sound alone was fit to work knots out of emotional muscle. "There you go, small one. Not a thing to worry about."

The baby calmed almost instantaneously. Crowley wanted to be annoyed with this. But he too felt a great deal calmer than he had not two seconds earlier. He would have to remember to ask Aziraphale what he had done. What the noise had been. It was wonderfully relaxing. He could have himself a good nights sleep on the combination of that, a glass of wine and a hand rub.

"Yeah, that'd be right. Calm down for the angel." He nonetheless griped. Wouldn't be any fun to not take exception.

"I have a very soothing aura." Aziraphale said, far the more smugly than what was necessarily appropriate for an angel.

"Well, she hasn't known you for six thousand years. Give it time."

"I thought you would be better at this, somehow." Aziraphale gave the baby a smooth, gentle rock; encouraging those shrewd looking eyes to feather ever the more gradually shut. Crowley felt suddenly and irrevocably envious of a two month old. "You delivered the Antichrist, after all."

"Handed over." Crowley corrected. "And he was in a basket the whole time. Didn't have much to do with him, really." He pulled a face as Aziraphale continued to contentedly rock the baby, which appeared to have relaxed to such a natural degree that she had dropped off to sleep in less than a minute. "Why are you such a natural at this?!"

Aziraphale continued to smile, ever the more smug and self-righteous in the light of his successes. "Because I'm an angel."

Crowley sneered. Sneerfully.

"I've nursed my fair share of babies in my time." Aziraphale added, somewhat mysteriously. Crowley lifted his brows curtly, playing into the meaning what was not at all hidden, but may very well have been if Aziraphale had been anyone or anything other than... well, Aziraphale.

"I never knew you'd had children. You've been holding out on me."

"They weren't my children, obviously." Aziraphale sighed, aware that Crowley was only teasing him but wanting to be clear on the point all the same. "Just human children. Sometimes a rather more direct helping hand was required along the way." He gave himself in to a moment of indulgence, leaning down so as to breathe in the scent of the baby's hair. He sighed, for reminder of it. "She still has that lovely newborn baby smell. See?"

Crowley had heard talk of this 'newborn baby smell' in his time. That the scent promoted the effusion of all manner of feel good hormones in a woman's brain in particular. He had never had much the opportunity to partake himself. That would have involved holding an infant and he had never much cause to get particularly close to such an unknown, potentially explosive variable.

But because Aziraphale was staring at him in that expectantly poignant way that he had, the demon of course folded like a wet noodle and leaned over to give the top of the baby's head a whiff.

 _It was like Aziraphale,_ he thought immediately. _Back when we first met, on the wall of the Garden of Eden._

That very same smell which was brand new. That smell what was innocence and unknowing and trusting and hopefulness personified.

That smell what was poised on the very brink of a waiting world, as ripe with potential and possibility as an apple, nourished and fat and ready for the hand what would reach up and pluck it free from the safety of its branch.

_Apples would wither to nothing if not plucked from the branch._

_But they were devoured if they were._

Crowley felt something shift intrinsically. Something meaningful.

He pushed it to the side.

The day was busy enough as it was.

**~X~**

* * *

To walk from Italy to London should take approximately three-hundred and twenty-five hours. The Man Who had Never Been had gotten quite lost in his shuffling about the European continent.

To wit, his mood was ever worsening and he was being increasingly thrown out of synch with Patientia, who was having a more and more difficult time of figuring out where her counterpart was likely to surface.

Little did she anticipate him coming in from the direct East as opposed to the South East.

Closer still however and closer ever the more by the hour.

A wave of fury and ire and bruised fists and unmitigated violence left in his wake.

* * *

**~X~**


	36. Or, in which Aziraphale has second thoughts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley had never been much good at this. Give him a picture of an elephant and he would colour outside of the lines every time. With a purple crayon, more the likely.
> 
> What structure he professed to having in his life was Aziraphale and without Aziraphale there to reinforce the foundations, the building blocks what was Crowley's existence had crumbled away.
> 
> Having learned of Aziraphale's passing he might have run to Alpha Centauri still and saved his own skin. But he hadn't.
> 
> He had instead gone to a bar and proceeded to drink himself steadily into oblivion. And wait in turn, for oblivion to find him.
> 
> An oblivion in which the neither of them could share together. There was no world that they could share beyond this one, if they were both to perish...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back, my angels and demons alike! Thank you as always for coming along on this journey with me! To those of you who have kudoed and commented, my extra special gratuity goes out to you for your kindness. In that vein, to all my lovelies who lurk, who read and who are quiet, you are none the lesser appreciated :) I love telling this story and I love whoever has taken time out of their day so as to share it with me. There will never be any pressure nor expectations on any of you. Just so long as you know how much you all mean to me for your support; even just clicking on the story and dropping in for a spell.
> 
> Big proper update this time, everyone! I promised I would have new content out by January and I always keep my word. In the next couple of days, I will have the last of the original content reviewed, freshly edited and out and some fresh new stuff before January comes to a close. Thanks as always for your patience and your time and to those who are reading for the first time; I hope that you enjoy :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday 13th of April - 5:25pm~** _   
_**The Bentley** _   
_**Some country road... ** _

"It's a... funny old world sometimes, isn't it?"

Crowley, contacts long since shed and eyes once more comfortably interred behind his glasses, stared straight ahead through the rain soaked windshield. They had been on the road almost an hour after leaving the reception and he had hardly been, what Aziraphale would consider, stellar company. He wasn't using the CD player in his car these days; for fear it would provide yet another avenue by which Hell could attempt to contact him. As such, the trip had been a quiet one and Crowley was hardly helping matters by adopting a sullen attitude interspersed with select moments of intense brooding.

"What's funny about it, exactly?" The demon said, with a tone what suggested he was spoiling for an argument. Aziraphale chose to ignore it, hoping that he was instead able to elevate the demon's poor mood with some good cheer.

"Well... how things sort of balance themselves out. One life departs this world and one life begins anew. For every tree cut down, another is planted. The cycle continues and renews itself." He glanced out the window, watching as the rain went chopping past. He himself felt rather light and refreshed from holding the human infant earlier and couldn't imagine how such a thing could not have lifted Crowley's dismal spirits. "It's all rather marvellous, when you think about it."

Crowley felt his temper flare. "Yeah. That's the _exact_ word I would use to describe Gretchen's death, Aziraphale." He said, leaning on the accelerator far the more than was recommended for the conditions. There was so much water on the road that he had felt the Bentley's wheels float on more than the one occasion. _"Marvellous."_

"I only meant to say-"

Crowley lifted his fingers from the wheel in a clear mark of reproach. "Aziraphale... My feet are sore, my arse is sore and my brain feels like its been seeped in tea. Real bad tea, like... English breakfast tea. If it's all the same to you, I could really go without all of the pious allegories and half-arsed sentimentalities right now." He gave a terse, staggered sigh, concentrating his efforts once more upon the wet road.

Aziraphale might once have dealt with chastisement without much in the way of protest. He was accustomed to Crowley's moods and found that backing off and giving him time in which to process these feelings was conducive to helping him move past them.

But that was then. This was _now_. And the Aziraphale of the here and now did not much like being spoken to as though he were a child. Especially when he had gone to such great efforts to be of support to Crowley during a difficult time.

He had done _nothing_ deserving of the attitude.

"My goodness," He remarked, feeling a surprisingly spiteful and venomous urge rise up in him. An urge to, as Crowley might say, 'take a piece out of him'. "I suppose I can only hope that if anything were to happen to _me_ one day that you would be half as put out as you clearly are by the passing of a woman you have known a mere manner of months."

Crowley felt an unfamiliar urge himself. An urge to turn and slap the taste out of Aziraphale's mouth. Instead, he gripped the wheel all the tighter, suppressed the impulse and said: "Now you're just being stupid. Stupid _and_ nasty."

"Stupid?" Aziraphale snapped, taking exception to this rather than his being categorized as 'nasty'. He was entirely aware that he had spoken out of spite. But what angered him all the more was just how narrow minded Crowley insisted on being. How he failed, as he so often did, to view things from any other angle besides the skewed perspective of his own. "I seem to recall that you, when thinking that I was in fact dead, took your supposed sorrows to a bar and drowned them under two and a half bottles of top shelf." He huffed, glaring out the window now with a great deal more disconcertment than he had done earlier. "Seems a rather poor commiseration after six thousand years of acquaintanceship."

Something snapped violently into focus in Crowley's aggravated mind. His nostrils filled with the sudden acrid stench of smoke. There was heat on his skin; hot enough to blister. A punch of pain to his chest, knocking him backwards, water stealing the burn from where it previously lay claim to his flesh.

Scraps of parchment, drifting down, all around.

Life torn to shreds. Reduced to ash.

To nothingness.

_Nothingness._

With a violent wrench of the wheel, Crowley peeled the Bentley, still puttering at a modest speed of ninety miles per hour, off of the road and onto a grassy verge long since neglected by an inattentive council. The area was rural; surmounted by rolling hills that might have been dotted with sheep if the driving sleet of rain hadn't blocked out most anything within a twenty yard radius. Crowley had very nearly driven his car into a dilapidated fence; crowned by barbed wire which fairly reeked of tetanus and good times spent at the ICU.

The unexpected jolting of the car had just about put the both of them through the windshield. Aziraphale was in fact directly on the cusp of reprimanding Crowley rather the firmly on providing some warning before embarking on an eleventh-hour off-road adventure but the demon had turned on him first.

He ripped his glasses off; all the better for Aziraphale to appreciate that there was not but a sliver of white present in his eyes and that the yellow was full and encompassing and devastating.

"I was waiting to die, _you stupid angel!"_ He yelled, and it was by far the loudest Crowley had ever screamed at him, the angriest he had ever been and the most deeply and exquisitely wounded. It was an explosion of so very much what had dwelt unchallenged in his soul over the passing of the last six months; spurred to the surface by the events what had transpired ever so instrumentally within the past two weeks alone.

Another sharp kick to that wall inside of him and Crowley found himself hunched over the steering wheel. He gripped it tight, but it wasn't enough. There was no point to it, but he was crying, _oh fuck_ he was _crying_ and it was right out here in the open for Aziraphale to see and he _just couldn't fucking stop it._

No sooner than he could scrape that image of floating ash from his mind. The smell of burning parchment what was seared into the nodes of his human brain. It played on repeat there, right inside of his head without pause and the pain, the pain he had felt, believing beyond doubt that the person he cared for more than anything was gone and that there was nothing, nothing, NOTHING.

Nothing but ash.

_Ashes to ashes._

Aziraphale did the right thing. He said nothing. Though his heart ached and he himself burned with the shame of having indulged his pettiness, he said and did nothing in an attempt to assuage it. He knew Crowley. And knew that the tears, though nothing of which to be ashamed, would be considered embarrassing.

He waited. Wanting to reach out all the while but knowing that this wouldn't help. Not yet.

"You have no idea," Crowley said after some moments. Forehead still pressed resolutely to the leather of the wheel. "What that day was like. What it did to me, Aziraphale. I thought you were... that you were dead."

His shoulders bucked on the word and he thumped his palm hard to the wheel. Aziraphale pressed his lips so tightly together it was a wonder he didn't strain them.

The pain what coursed through Crowley's body... intermingled with the powerful, assertions of love, of emotional need... To an angel it was every bit as suffocating as having a pillow pressed to your face. With the ever the more strange sensation of wanting to reach out and soothe the person what was attempting to smother you.

"It struck me dumb, angel. I couldn't cry. I couldn't breathe. Every single part of what made me me... it hurt. I felt like the very air was burning me alive." He lifted his head and his eyes were shining. His cheeks were drenched. He put the handbrake on at last, shifted back on the gears and turned the key in the ignition. The engine idled out and died. He switched the headlights off. "I didn't even have your body. Not a piece of your clothing. The fire took everything. The book had just a bit of your scent and that was it. You were gone and there was nothing to prove that you ever at all existed. Except for what was in my head."

He gave a congested sniff and it took every ounce of Aziraphale's self control not to offer him his handkerchief once more. The tears were awful enough but when juxtaposed with a running nose...

"I wanted to... save this world because it's the world that _we_ have seen through and loved together. But the moment I thought that I would no longer be able to share that future with you, it ceased to exist. Nothing mattered." Crowley used the heel of his hand to wipe up under his eyes. His lips had taken on an absolutely heartbreaking droopy countenance, what made Aziraphale ache all the more inside to see it. "Today with Gretchen's funeral it was about paying respect and letting go and moving on with life." He looked at Aziraphale, no longer caring if he was giving too much away. What could it possibly matter, when he had lived the awful, unbearable alternative? When he continued to live it; every time he closed his eyes, smelt the distant burning of a woodfire. Walked into the blessed bookshop. "There's no life for me without you. There's no moving on. There's nothing."

_Ash. Just... ash._

"My darling," Aziraphale murmured, the tremor in his voice giving rise to the tears what now formed uninhibited in his own eyes. "I don't want that to be true."

"I'm sorry, but it is. That's why I was sitting in that bar. Waiting for the world to end." Crowley felt his face wrench as though it were a piece of paper balled in the hand of a tired, frustrated writer, prepared to haul their hours long efforts into the wastepaper basket. "Waiting for it to take me with it."

And Aziraphale at long last stumbled up on the understanding. Should have understood and much sooner at that. Crowley might have made ever a good show of seeming to be in control, but he was not indefatigable, much as he might have otherwise claimed. He was far the more sensitive than Aziraphale was, in fact, who used the stringent enforcement of structure by which to provide sense to the otherwise chaotic nature of the world.

Perhaps it was a military thing. Perhaps it was a having lived so long in England thing, either or. But for Aziraphale, it was a provision of order. And order was simplistic. It lent itself ever so well to an ever the more useful survival strategy which was compartmentalization.

Crowley had never been much good at this. Give him a picture of an elephant and he would colour outside of the lines every time. With a purple crayon, more the likely.

What structure he professed to having in his life was Aziraphale and without Aziraphale there to reinforce the foundations, the building blocks what was Crowley's existence had crumbled away.

Having learned of Aziraphale's passing he might have run to Alpha Centauri still and saved his own skin. But he hadn't.

He had instead gone to a bar and proceeded to drink himself steadily into oblivion. And wait in turn, for oblivion to find him.

An oblivion in which the neither of them could share together. There was no world that they could share beyond this one, if they were both to perish.

Crowley, Aziraphale realized, was traumatized. The events of the would be Armageddon had made their mark on his tender soul and he was not possessed of the coping mechanisms that were ever so inherently a part of who Aziraphale was as a by-product of his installation within the Heaven based militia.

All of this; the job, the death of his client, had triggered something what might have lain dormant, yet ever still destructive in Crowley's heart. And he was foundering with the weight of it now. And it was heavy and awful and Aziraphale had been ever so much the fool for not anticipating it.

But then... it was not until recent times that he had truly come to appreciate just how much he meant to Crowley. To what great and unfettered depths that love and dependency went.

_To die; to sleep, perchance to dream._

_Ah, there's the rub..._

For that sleep of death was much preferred to the empty echo of a world in which they could not share together.

Whether it was safe to do so, Aziraphale was not certain. Of what he was certain, was the need to bridge that space between them and impart his touch upon the person that he loved.

He lent his fingertips through the hair above Crowley's ear; coursed his thumb through the thickly styled strands. Touched the backs of his fingers to the tightly flexed concaves of his cheeks.

"Oh my dear, I'm so sorry. For that and for... for how I behaved just now."

"Where did that even come from, Aziraphale?" Crowley said, turning in his seat so that Aziraphale could properly appreciate the look of bewildermentupon his face. "That's not like you. You're not petty. Or jealous. And that's honestly what it sounded like. Like you... resent that poor woman for having had some tiny place in my life."

Aziraphale kept his hand right where it was; turning small, warm circles just offside of Crowley's lips.

"I'll be honest with you; because I always want to be upfront where you're concerned. And I hate myself for it, but ...you're right." With his free hand, he slapped his palm to the curve of his thigh. Broke eye contact, much as he always did where deep shame and guilt were concerned. Crowley's eyes were always so... honest. It only made his own failings feel worse in the face of it. "There was a part of me that... resented Gretchen. A part what resents this new side of your life."

"Excuse me…" Crowley said, leaning back so that Aziraphale's touch was forced from his face. He could not have looked more the astonished than if he had wandered up on a steak and kidney pie what _didn't_ make him want to vomit on the first bite. "Unless memory fails, wasn't it _you_ who suggested I get a job in the first place? And now that I have, you go and get all jealous and bent out of shape because I've found something I'm good at? Aside from raising plants and instigating demonic shenanigans?"

"Yes. Yes, that's true-"

"Let's not go forgetting that you're the one who was getting all annoyed with me being underfoot! You're the one who 'wanted some time to yourself'. Ya can't have it both ways, Aziraphale, that's not how shit works!"

"I know!" Aziraphale interjected, aware that once the train of Crowley's tangents got to running that it was near impossible to pull it up short. "I know I'm being ridiculous! It's just... when I saw you getting so very excited about your new job... about the people you had met, the things you were doing... and not to mention taking Gretchen out to do all the things that you and I would do together, how deeply her death struck you..." He sighed, looking out the window again. It struck him that the rain was a soothing thing what he very much needed, right now. Cupping about the car as though it were two, soft hands; curtaining them from the rest of the world. "I became... frightened."

This was a new one on Crowley. Aziraphale got anxious about things, sure, but he never seemed genuinely frightened by much of anything. He was stalwart, in that regard.

"What the... Heaven would you have to be frightened of?"

"You're all I have, Crowley!" The words burst out with such disarming candour that Aziraphale fancied himself more the shocked by them than Crowley. It was the dam what held shut the flood gate and before he had the chance to prepare himself, every little thing what he himself had kept at bay with the practiced decorum of both an angel and a gentleman came flooding unappealing out. "Apart from... you know, restaurant owners, chefs, food truck operators, the dry cleaner, my manicurist and my barber, but those are just superficial relationships at the end of the day! Seeing you enjoying yourself and establishing friendships outside of us... it truly made me... happy, Crowley."

Crowley looked every bit as though he might have willingly partaken of iguana bile before swallowing whatever bullshit it was that Aziraphale was attempting to insincerely spoon feed him.

"But it also made me so very afraid." Aziraphale established, perhaps the more honestly. It was difficult to expose yourself such as this. He thought Crowley ever the more courageous for his willingness to do so. "I suppose I have just... gotten spoilt with the feeling that I have been the only important person in your life. There never seemed to be much in the way of competition. But now... you have... other avenues. Other options. And it... it frightened me. Just a little."

This was all very strange to Crowley. Very strange and very... new. Aziraphale had never been so candid with him before. Had never permitted himself space in which to give credence to the things what he was feeling inside. Things what were ever the less angelic but were fallible and repugnant and shameful.

And they were beautiful things.

"What were you so afraid was going to happen?" Crowley asked, taking up his sunglasses off of the car seat and placing them on the dashboard. He set them down a little crooked and Aziraphale reached out to straighten them.

"I thought you might... you might realize that... that there was more to the world than just..." He accidentally poked one side of the glasses that little too far and it tilted off balance and toppled down to land somewhere on the floor of the Bentley.

"... than you." Crowley concluded, making no attempts to go chasing after the glasses. Wasn't as though they were at any risk of getting dirty. The floor of the car was as immaculate as it always was.

Aziraphale nodded somewhere off in the vague direction of the side mirror, unable to look Crowley in the eye. This was all so... embarrassing. And disgraceful.

"I was ever so frightened that... that you would realize just... just how different we are. That there's so much more out there for you to explore."

"Aziraphale, I started working at a nursing home," Crowley established, with some exasperation. He was admittedly a little amused as well but hardly considered it fair to potentially upset an already disconcerted angel further. "I didn't join some Assyrian cult."

"That's not the point. I know it's my fault, for encouraging you to try something different, to spread your..." Aziraphale raised his hands out to each side of himself; as though emulating a plane. "- wings. But I didn't realize quite how it was going to make me feel. I feel awful for the short sightedness but... to see you so happy in the company of the others well... it rather made me feel that you might not care so much for mine anymore. That you would feel you were... missing out."

"That's ridiculous..." Crowley growled, feeling exhaustion not so much as creep up on him as hurl a heavy blanket over his entire being as though he were a budgie in a cage.

"Is it?" Aziraphale asked, not quite so certain that he was in fact being ridiculous.

"Yes, it bloody well is!" Crowley turned back to him with a look what was very firm and very clearly done with the pity party. "Just because I might share some of the same interests with other people doesn't mean that I'm going to throw you to the wolves on account of it! What kind of disloyal prat do you think I am? We've been at one another's sides over six thousand years now! I haven't gotten bored of you yet!"

"I wonder how. We are very different." Aziraphale mused, thinking it a rather obvious observation for two beings what could not be more distinct from one another than chalk and cheese. Crowley responded by pinning his fingers to his forehead in that particular gesture people have for when their energy is wearing thin but they are attempting to soldier on, all the same.

"That's just the thing, we're not very different. Not where it matters. You've always gotten hung up on that, angel. The tactile stuff." And because Aziraphale persisted with looking so stricken, added: "Come on. Use your words."

"I _shouldn't_." The angel gave his usual little smile what he trotted out when he was anxious. He had a thousand different smiles, did Aziraphale. They said quite as much as Crowley's more expressive features might have done. "It's so terribly wrong to indulge this. And offensive."

"It's just you and me." Crowley said softly, glancing his fingertip down the side of Aziraphale's face. Brushing through the hair what bridged his temples. "I don't care if it's wrong or awful. All the better really."

It was still something Aziraphale was learning to do; to speak his mind. It wasn't a thing what was encouraged in Heaven and most certainly was not encouraged of an angel. To put one's needs ahead of the collective good was a selfish indulgence.

But in pretending to be anything other than who he truly was, to hide the actuality of his feelings seemed somehow far the more selfish to Aziraphale than speaking them aloud. Brick by brick they were tearing down what little of the wall remained between them. Honesty, was the chisel with which they scraped away the mortar.

"I... I absolutely adored everything you said about Gretchen in your eulogy today." Aziraphale said, reaching up and taking Crowley's fingers into the clutch of his own. Rubbing his thumb across the ridges of his knuckles. "It was... sensitive and lovely and beautiful." He physically winced, because there, on the tip of his tongue, were poised the very words which proved him to be small and petty and weak of will. "There was... just a part of me what... what wished that... those were words what you might have ascribed to me."

He raised the hand which wasn't currently cupped about Crowley's, seeing that the demon was on the verge of interjecting.

"It's all right. I don't need you to reassure me. I don't agree with what I am saying. I am simply telling you how I am _feeling._ And I don't agree with those feelings either. I understand entirely and I condemn myself for having them in the first place. I am awful." He said and truly believed it. Hurt from believing it. "I'm selfish and jealous and... possessive. I want to share you with the world, but in the same breath I want to keep every last inch of you for myself."

He would not have been at all surprised if Crowley had given him a firm rounding off for this. It sounded so... childish. Like the sort of a thing a teenager in the throes of first love would say; carried away by the naïve notion that the object of their affections encompassed the entirety of their existence. That they needed to be together in every waking moment and that no one dare come between them or even so much as look at them.

It was ridiculous. Aziraphale would not at all have blamed Crowley for laughing at him for it. But the demon once again surprised him; giving a soft, accommodating look as he squeezed his fingers.

"You have every last inch, angel. You always have." He said and Aziraphale knew that it was true. The look in Crowley's eyes was incontestable. The feelings of love pouring out of him were deluge enough to drown his senses. "There's no force strong enough in Heaven, Hell, or whatever the fuck else is out there that could tear me away from you." He smiled, glanced a fingertip off of Aziraphale's nose. Teasing. "Stuck with me for good, I'm afraid. Or for... bad. You know."

"There is nothing whatsoever about you that is bad, my dear." Aziraphale said, returning the smile. He felt light with relief.

Crowley understood. He understood and he did not condemn Aziraphale for his feelings.

His love was merciful. And generous. And loyal.

"Go on with you now." Crowley murmured, turning and sinking back into his seat at the usual despairing of his being labelled 'good' in some way. He drummed his fingers on the wheel a moment and decided to share, in turn, some of the thoughts which had been troubling him. "Aziraphale... do you think it's possible that my..." He paused, whet his lips. Stared out along the dashboard into a place which might gift him some distance between the awfulness of his considerations. "... that when I... changed the food that it..."

"Don't." Aziraphale said, holding up a finger to stop him in his tracks. His voice was not curt but rather a gentle remonstration. "Gretchen was ninety-two years old, Crowley. A stiff enough breeze would have been enough to finish her off."

"I just can't help wondering that if... if the food hadn't been so rich... maybe her heart would have been stronger."

"My dear, you are not responsible for this. You do not work full time and you were not using magic to saturate the meals with fistfuls of cheese and butter and coconut oil. I should hope." Crowley shook his head to indicate that this was not, of course, what he had been doing. "You were doing something kind and thoughtful. There are a great many humans who do not make it to the age of ninety, let alone ninety-two." Aziraphale reached across, took up Crowley's hand from the wheel and gave it yet another comforting squeeze. Placed a soft kiss into the waiting clutch of his palm. "I'm afraid that it was just her time. But you are not to continue with the entertaining of the idea that you were in some way responsible for her passing. You remember what your manager said? You gave that dear woman a great deal of joy in her past few months. I will not have you blaming yourself for this, do you understand?"

Crowley's lower lip gave a violent tremor and he sucked it back into his mouth to try and get it under control. He nodded, grateful for how Aziraphale had chosen to phrase his comfort; passing it off as an instruction for which he need only abide.

He had needed to hear those words. Needed some valid argument to shake the conviction he had been nursing that he had been somehow complicit in seeing Gretchen off.

"... I liked the old girl, Aziraphale. I liked being able to talk to someone who wasn't you. Not because she wasn't you but... I got to talk about you to someone else. Not to mention she was a bloody fire cracker." He slumped back in his seat, angling his gaze towards the ceiling. Could almost see the shapes forming before his eyes; the drifting fragments what fire spat out once it had finished consuming everything that was in its path. Like an owl, regurgitating a pellet of food. "This whole thing... I think it just... "

"Yes?"

"I think it just triggered some shit off for me."

"What... sort of..." Aziraphale cleared his throat, searching for a suitable synonym which would prevent him from needing to swear. "... stuff?"

"About you." Crowley turned to look at him. _If it had not been me in his body that day, he too would have been devoured by the flame._ "Gretchen dying was like... well, it was sorta like a slap in the face for me. I don't think I..." His eyes shifted back towards the windshield. The rain wasn't letting up. Perhaps God had gone and gotten 'tetchy' again, who would know? "...ever really got over what happened that day..."

_Books burning, everything burning, Aziraphale, where the Heaven are you, there was no smell, nothing but the smell of paper, of fire, of soot, of ash but not that sweetness, that soft talc, the cologne, the smell which was Aziraphale, it was gone, you're GONE YOU'RE GONE and there's NOTHING, there's nothing LEFT, what am I supposed to DO, what else can I do but DIE-_

"I liked Gretchen. She died. Something I really, really liked was... taken away. And it dawned on me, you know... Now that Heaven and Hell no longer have our backs..." He turned to look at Aziraphale with some urgency. The grief what was tormenting his mind written so neatly into his face it might very well have been the open pages of a book. "What happens if we die?"

Aziraphale thought on this a moment. He hadn't an answer ready. Perhaps he had avoided thinking on it too long himself.

"Our bodies aren't going to be restored. Not anymore. We're fucked if anything ever happens to us." Crowley continued, meaningfully. "The world is so much more dangerous now than it has ever been. We could die, angel. You could die and..." Tears filled his eyes again but he didn't bother with hiding them. He was very scared and he was hurting real bad and everything suddenly seemed far too big and impossible for one little demon to deal with. "If it hurts this much to watch an old lady I barely knew die and disappear forever, I don't even want to imagine how it would feel to lose you. It was too hard the first time... the first time I thought it happened, I mean."

"Now you must understand how I felt when you asked me to bring you that Holy Water." Aziraphale said, taking his handkerchief out of his pocket and pinching the corner between his fingers. He used it to dab up underneath and around Crowley's eyes. And the demon went right on ahead and let him. He really was in a sad and sorry state. "The very idea that you could... take yourself out of this world. Destroy yourself."

"I only ever wanted it to protect myself. I told you it was insurance. You know that."

"But I didn't know it _then_. I wasn't... certain. I wasn't convinced." Aziraphale sighed, tucking the handkerchief back into his pocket. He had a feeling it was more the likely to make an appearance again shortly. "Seems I'm not the only one who's afraid."

"No." Crowley sniffled. "No. You're just afraid for stupid reasons. I'm never going to leave you, you stupid idiot. But we still might die. ... You might..." He choked on the word as though it were a piece of chicken docking itself in the port of his windpipe. "-die..."

"Crowley, we're going to be fine. That's not going to happen."

"I need to start driving slower. I need to be more careful. We both need to be more careful." Crowley was sort of rambling now. Staring out through the windshield as though only just being made aware of all the potential dangers what lurked around every earthly corner. Much like a parent after bringing their first child home from the hospital and realizing just how many sharp, pointy corners their furniture had. "You need to start looking both ways when you cross the street. Stop fucking off to war-torn places just because you heard they've got something vaguely 'scrummy' on the menu. Stop eating so much rich food. You could get high cholesterol. Have a heart attack."

"To be fair," Aziraphale said, feeling it was rather the rich of Crowley to suggest he was at risk of organ failure when the demon drank as though every day were his last. "I am most... usually the one to be careful in my day to day goings on. It's you who is going to have to start taking things a little more seriously. You drive like an absolute loon. You run your mouth when you really ought to know better. You've had alcohol poisoning no less than seven thousand times and you've given yourself eight heart attacks from dancing. You've fallen off of roofs, out of moving vehicles and, on one particularly memorable occasion, into the path of an oncoming train. I fairly much had to scrape what was left of you up with a spatula." He gave the demon a somewhat thin-lipped, prudish glance. "You're an accident looking for somewhere to happen, Anthony J. Crowley."

"I know. I know _._ " Anthony J. Crowley admitted, not even attempting to argue the point but slumping himself back over the wheel and pressing his forehead so tightly into the leather that the seams were likely to imprint themselves in his skin. His upper torso shook as he surrendered once more to his sorrow. "I'm sorry."

"You don't need to be sorry. I'm the one who's sorry." Aziraphale's own eyes clouded over with tears, what meagre irritation he had been nursing sluicing neatly away so that the only feelings remaining were those of love and deepest sympathy. "I'm so sorry that your friend died."

Overcome by emotion, he scooted across the seat, putting his arm about Crowley's shoulders and guiding him into his embrace. His palm found the tear stained curve of the demon's cheek and he held him; placing kisses to his forehead, his temples, the lids of each of his weeping eyes. Those sweet, sad tears; purer than the holiest of Holy water.

"I'm so sorry, my darling... I hate that you have this pain..." He whispered. Crowley, pressed deeply within the confines of his arms, felt a stirring in response to the touch of the angels lips. A stirring what was ever so strange, given the context in which they were offered but somehow also appropriate. And a stirring what he wanted to surrender to ever more intensely by the moment.

"Don't go getting all soft on me, angel..." He raised his head, pressed his palm to the side of Aziraphale's neck. Felt for his pulse, marked its point with his fingertips and caressed over it. Reassurance of the angel's still being there. "You know I'm not gonna... stand for that..."

What started out as comfort quickly turned into something else; as it so often invariably does. Crowley's lips touched to Aziraphale's in the very softest of kisses and the spark what was being nurtured between them flared with sudden brilliance and caught. Trust was a potent kindling and the flame what erupted from the meeting of their passions was one which burned voraciously.

They came together as much as the awkward angle of the car seat would allow. Those tender kisses soon gave way to something what was far the more ravenous; demanding of greater levels of satiation.

None of the kisses they had shared thus far could compare. When Aziraphale pushed against Crowley, the demon pushed back with just as much conviction. The sounds of their unneeded breaths were thick with desire and the soft gasps and murmurs and moans passed between them at a flurried and impatient pace. Their lips were parted much more than Crowley could ever remember being and Aziraphale's tongue was exploring his own with little to nothing in the way of shame.

The suit jacket seemed much too constrictive and Crowley reached down to unbutton it. Imagine his surprise when Aziraphale saw fit to assist; knocking the demon's trembling fingers aside so as to get the job done faster. He took hold then of each of lapel, pressing the jacket off of Crowley's shoulders, with the demon just about dislocating his arms in a frantic bid to free them from the sleeves. When the left was shed, Aziraphale took hold of the right, peeling it down off of Crowley as though it were nothing more challenging than a mandarin peel and tossing the garment into the backseat.

He captured each side of the demon's face between his hands now, kissing him with such desperate intensity that Crowley felt a little lightheaded. He thought he might have started sinking backwards, what with the dizzying effect that the angel was having on him.

And then he realized that he _was_ in fact sinking backwards.

Or rather, that Aziraphale was _pushing_ him backwards.

It was all happening very quickly but that was a pace of which Crowley was very the much accustomed. He went with the flow, rolling his left knee up close to his chest before tipping it over to press as far into the seat of the Bentley as he was able. Aziraphale moved so that he was slotted between this provocatively offered space, pressing himself down so that his body was flush with Crowley's, feeling in turn the sensual pressure of the demon's thighs locking to either side of his hips.

They had to shuffle a little, so that Crowley wasn't about to go and get jammed up against the drivers side door. The heel of his hand accidentally honked the horn as he reached out to steady his descent on the steering wheel. The both tittered softly at the interruption but then they were back to kissing and Crowley was very aware of Aziraphale's weight driving him down fully into the seat, that his fingers were clutching tightly into the back of his jacket and their legs were tangling and the windows were starting to fog up.

Neither seemed to care for the fact that they were parked just barely offside of a road which, in better conditions, might have been considered moderately busy. Three cars had in fact already driven past whilst they had been sitting there, though the occupants had done precious little aside from glancing at the Bentley and remarking as to what a beautifully restored old model it was.

_Is this it?_ Crowley found himself wondering, as Aziraphale's hand reached down to longingly caress the underside of his thigh. _For all the talk of making something special of it, are we just going to go ahead and do it in the front seat of my car, late afternoon, with every chance of getting caught by either highway patrol or extraordinarily ardent blackberry pickers?_

Aziraphale hadn't yet stopped, which meant, more the likely, that his angelic failsafe's weren't acting up. He seemed every bit as intent on devouring Crowley as he might have done some delicious tart what had been served for him at the Ritz; only without the well mannered decorum he would have demonstrated in a civilized setting. And Crowley could hardly care less as to the when's and how's their first 'time' came about. In fact, doing it in the Bentley, during the day, with the risk of being caught, seemed to him a perfectly acceptable means of consummating their relationship.

An extraordinarily hot means, to boot.

But of course, just when everything seemed to be going along swimmingly, Aziraphale recoiled with a sudden cry of pain, clutching the sides of his head between fingers that were twisted into amorphous talons. A high pitched screech, like a Nawal signalling its mate, had speared itself violently through his head; with agony enough to send his stomach to curdling.

Crowley groaned, knowing precisely what was going on and rather wishing he had stronger fists so that he could punch something without breaking his knuckles.

"Not _again!_ "

Aziraphale, lips peeled back from teeth clenched so tightly it was a wonder he did not shatter them, sank against the car door. The sharpness of the horrendous sound had dimmed, leaving him with a feeling which he might have equated to a recovering migraine. It had been quite enough of a reprimand to douse every spotfire of passion what had spread throughout his body.

"Yes," He managed to say, when he was finally capable of speaking. He sighed, eyes flinched shut and fingers massaging the crinkled peak between his furrowed brows. It was so disappointing... for just a moment there, he thought it had loosened its grip on him. "I'm afraid so."

Crowley was obviously disappointed and frustrated too, but reminded himself that this was far the more difficult for Aziraphale then it was for him. The demon took a few slow breaths, marshalling his own feelings on the matter and heaved himself upright. It was decidedly more difficult than it might otherwise have been; his pants had gotten awful tight in the past few minutes.

"We'll get there." He murmured, reaching over and giving the angel's knee a supportive rub. Aziraphale had not yet opened his eyes and his breaths were intensely laboured.

It had been a bad one. The worst, in fact.

"I don't know... it feels..." He groaned as yet another stab of pain lay siege to his brain, as though making up good and proper for its inattention during the day. It was like... someone holding a flame to a knife and then driving that searing blade directly into your ear canal. And twisting it, for good measure. "-as though it's getting worse..."

"It's just going to take some time, angel." Crowley insisted, feeling every bit as sure of this as he was certain that the sky was blue, that rain was wet and that _Downton Abbey_ was by far one of the greatest shows to come out of England since _Upstairs Downstairs_ coveted the screens in 1971.

"If only I believed that..." The angel said, not altogether paying a great deal of attention to what was coming out of his mouth. The pain was overshadowing everything, making it near to impossible to feel anything other than the greatest consternation.

Crowley cocked his head, as a small worm of concern wriggled on in to make its temporary abode in his belly. He did not like the angel's tone. He sounded... defeated.

"What do you mean?

"Perhaps..." Aziraphale was disheartened and sick with the misery of it all. He spoke, mainly to himself as though unaware of Crowley being within spitting distance of him. "...perhaps this was all just a mistake..."

Crowley sat up straight, as though something had slithered on up and bitten him on a particularly sensitive part of the lower anatomy. "I'm sorry... do you want to repeat what you just said?"

And because he was so very exasperated and rendered ever the more short sighted by the debilitating degree of the pain he was experiencing, Aziraphale went right ahead and repeated it.

"I said... perhaps this was all just a mistake."

You might have heard a pin drop in the silence that followed. You might even have heard the shocked outcry of tiny voices from the angels and demons what might otherwise have been dancing upon it. Crowley blinked at Aziraphale, a cold, sharp edged slab forming in the wall of his chest. He hoped he had heard wrong.

"A mistake...?" He turned slowly in his seat, as though perched upon a lazy Susan and stared, unblinkingly now, out of the windshield. You could have measured his shock by the litre-load. "Us, you mean?"

* * *

**~X~**


	37. Or, in which two venerable beings have a mature discussion.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The darkness distilled itself. Receded back from whence it came. Beelzebub remained in the wake of it; restored once more to their human form and struck numb and silent and unquestionably baffled. They stared at Gabriel, much as they might have done all those distant millennia ago and that soft, warm pull of Heaven tightened its hold, stretched to fill them.
> 
> As though a hand were reaching out...
> 
> Reaching out to invite them back in...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I'm so sorry guys, I meant to update this piece at the same time as the other one, but it was very late where I am and I've been sleeping terribly the past few nights :/ Here is the second half, and once more; sorry for the delay! <3

**~X~**

* * *

It would be quite incorrect to suggest that Aziraphale regretted what he had said. It would be quite true however, to say that not all failsafe's start and end with pain alone.

Some failsafe's leave a more lasting mark. This was in fact the biological purpose of the sharp sound.

It had pierced Aziraphale's mind.

And planted within a poisonous seed of doubt.

Leaving it to fester through his subconscious.

"Not... _us_ in general..." He said, feeling very confused as yet another punitive resonance punctured the inside of his head. There were words what were forming in there; words which begged to breathe themselves to life on the tip of his tongue. With each point of resistance he made against them, the pain about turned.

_Did he really mean this?_

"But a mistake thinking we could have any other future besides just staring at one other over a table, you mean?" Crowley was saying; his face worse than miserable. Struck numb, would perhaps be a more appropriate appraisal. As though all his walls were strung fiercely back up inside of himself, with his soul hunkered square and shivering behind them.

"I don't know..." Aziraphale said, struggling. There was anger rising up in him now and it seemed inordinately out of place. He was not an angry creature and if he was angry with anything, than it was the damned celestial barbs which pipped him at the post with every turn that he took.

Why then, did he want ever so much to direct this anger at Crowley?

"Well, you seemed to have a fairly good idea about a week ago when you nearly killed our registered cook just so as you could rock up to work and declare yourself to me!" Crowley was angry too. And just as every bit as confused. And worse still; terrified. "You _told_ me this is what you wanted. That you wanted a future with me that was more than what we've always had. You told me you... that you wanted me. That you love me. Is none of that true?"

He couldn't cry again. Wouldn't. Not even if he wanted to.

"Of course it is, I would hardly lie to you about such things!" Aziraphale said, because he knew fully well that this was as every bit as true then as it was now. His feelings were not the issue here but rather what those feelings _wrought_ in return for his indulgence of them. Something which Crowley seemed to be having an inordinate amount of difficulty getting his head around and this inhibition of his capacity to do so worsened Aziraphale's frustration more by the moment.

"Well, reality check, angel but none of this shit comes pain free! Maybe you just need to stop being such a big girls blouse about it!"

And now the anger came easy; his own irritation feeding into that which was already present. "That's easy for you to say, you're not the one that gets a red hot iron seared into your brain every time you try and simply reach out for the person that you love! It's excruciating! It's heart breaking! And to refer to it as being anything so pedestrian as pain is insulting! _"_

"So your solution is what then? Hmm? Give up?" Crowley had gotten closer to him in the past couple of moments. He was doing that thing with his eyes when he wished to drive a point home. The intensity of his gaze was like a couple of sub-atomic drills boring into Aziraphale's eyes in return. "Give up on everything we could have?"

"I just don't..." Aziraphale felt helpless. Something terrible was happening inside of his mind and he couldn't seem to push it back. "-see it getting any better. "

"You have to work at it. Aziraphale..." Crowley waited for the angel to meet his gaze. It took longer than he would have liked. "I... I can't go back to how things were before."

He thought he might have been able to. If the alternative was Aziraphale being forced to endure pain with every touch or embrace or kiss that they shared. He thought that he could have been kind enough, loving enough and selfless enough to make the sacrifice. To return their relationship to the platonic state of which they had long shared, but for which he had never felt entirely satisfied by.

Crowley realized, in that pivotal moment, that it was not just Aziraphale who was selfish, but he himself as well. It was one thing, he realized, to make the offer to roll back the progress of their relationship and return it to the virginal status quo of the past six thousand years. A very different thing, for the offer to be accepted.

What he had offered Aziraphale, those few nights earlier, had been nothing more than empty words.

And it shocked him deeply, to realize how self-serving and greedy he truly was.

_I have had a taste of something for which I have long been starving. And blessed if I'll let go of it now._

_I won't allow you to slip from between my fingers again._

"There's no 'can't' about it." Aziraphale's resentment at this was very real. He knew _._ "You 'won't'."

"Fine then. I 'won't' go back to the way things were before." Crowley said. He should have been ashamed for his selfishness, but all he felt in that moment was that same desperate and ferocious need he had experienced when kissing Aziraphale in the Bentley that first time. That feeling of being somehow entitled. Of wanting to pin the angel down, to bite him, to rip away his clothes and simply take what should not have been so demonstrably difficult to freely give. "I won't go back to just staring at you over a table, wishing there could be something more. There has to be something more!"

Crowley's eyes could be fierce when he wanted them to be. But that was nothing whence compared to the savagery of the gaze Aziraphale now turned on him. The blue of those usually soft and temperate eyes seemed to blaze with a cruelty what burned as resolutely and unforgivingly as dry ice. And for the first time in six thousand years, Crowley felt, for just the slightest sliver of a second, that Aziraphale had felt pure hatred for him.

"You're willing to force me to endure unfathomable pain every single day for the rest of our lives, because you don't believe that there is any point to having a relationship that doesn't include sex?!"

"Oh, get off your fucking high horse." Crowley might have been shocked by the concentration of Aziraphale's glare but this was a thing what was too important not to fight for. "You were the one who was on top of me not two minutes ago. And unless you're smuggling a tin of shortbread from the reception in your pants, _not that it would surprise me,_ then you were just as happy to be there as I was." He slapped a hand sharply to the back of the car seat, close by to Aziraphale's face. The force of the strike resonated about the interior of the car. "Don't you dare go acting all high and mighty with me about wanting to have sex, when you clearly want it just as much as I do!"

The fact that he had lashed out shocked a great deal of the ire out of Aziraphale's system. The emotion however, continued to linger at the forefront. And it was a long ways off from being drained.

"Yes, of course I want it, you damnable fool! Of course I do! You don't think that this is killing me?! Do you even realize how much I want you, sitting here even now?" He pressed himself back against the cool barrier of the car door, smacked the crown of his head to the window hard enough to skitter rain drops what had hung suspended there upon the glass. "Dear God, Crowley, I ache for you..."

"Then we need to keep working at it." The demon said, softening his voice a little. It was clear that Aziraphale was suffering; was fighting an assortment of battles within his own mind what Crowley could not even begin to understand. But couldn't the angel see that he was here for him? That the struggle they faced was a shared one? "Work on building up a tolerance, just like you said before. Little by little. Exposure therapy, remember? So what if it takes another six thousand years?"

"I can't endure six thousand years of this, Crowley!" Aziraphale yelled, because Crowley had moved within touching distance of him now and sharp pricks had started spattering across his mind like the needle of a vicious sewing machine. "Not if it's getting stronger. It's going to either kill me or drive me insane." He turned away, bringing his legs back down under the dashboard. Overcome and exhausted and done with it all. "... I'm sorry."

Crowley sat there, looking every bit as though someone had gone and run a knife through him. It likely would have hurt less than this. _Just about anything,_ he thought, _would hurt less than this._

_What had happened?_

_Everything was shaping up just right. We were together, we were working on things._

_We_ love _each other._

_Where did I make a wrong turn?_

_How can he still not want to fight for us?_

_For me?_

His head was back on the steering wheel. And he was crying again. Good and proper. Who the fuck cared? What did it matter?

The world could end again. Disintegrate into ash and soot and boiling goo beneath his feet and it wouldn't matter. He would hardly take notice.

"Why are you doing this to me?!" He was sobbing and it was wretched and pathetic and he just didn't care. "Why did you even bother coming to work and giving me some hope if you were just going to take it away?!"

And to see Crowley like this, was as though someone had leaned across and espoused a healing breath into Aziraphale's ear; clearing the fog which had curled about his brain like a noxious gas. The anger was gone and all that was left was pity and remorse and the pain from seeing someone he loved ever so dearly hunkered about the wheel of the car as though he were adrift at sea and clinging to a life preserver.

"Oh, Crowley, I..." He reached out to him but Crowley slapped his hand with such violence that it ricoheted off the leather seat of the Bentley.

"Don't you dare! Don't you dare fucking touch me, you remorseless bastard! Forget it then! Forget you! _"_ Eyes streaming, he threw open the car door and toppled himself headlong into the downpour. "If only I fucking could!"

And the next thing Aziraphale knew, Crowley had hurdled himself over the drainage ditch and was attempting to inelegantly mount the barbed wire fence so as to enter the adjacent field. Aziraphale clambered over across the seat and called desperately out though the still open drivers side door.

"Crowley, where are you going?!"

"AWAY FROM YOU!" The demon bellowed back, managing to tumble himself over the fence but getting his trouser cuff caught in the barbed wire along the way. He bounced ungainly about on one leg before freeing himself with an ostentatious yank, which tore the pant leg and left a long, likely stinging mark in his shin. He cupped a hand to it, hissing his displeasure before turning and limping off into the surrounding fog.

"Crowley, you can't go running off into a random meadow in the middle of storm! You're going to catch a chill!" Aziraphale leaned further out the door, getting his own hair soaked in the process. "CROWLEY!"

The demon responded by sticking his middle finger up over his shoulder before stumbling gracelessly out of sight. The rain and the fog quickly reverted his figure into that of dim shadow, before then too swallowing this up entirely.

He was a long time gone. Fifteen minutes passed, and Aziraphale was far beyond the point of being somewhat marginally worried. They had only barely just finished discussing how they both needed to start taking better care of themselves; treating their existences with a temperateness you might espouse upon a cherished porcelain cup.

Crowley, Aziraphale reasoned, needed to be treated in just the same manner as a human being would.

And human beings didn't habitually take off into cow fields in the middle of a rain storm in the godless middle of nowhere. With the exception of early afternoon sitcoms, at least.

_And those things that I said..._ why _did I say them?_

_What on earth have I done?_

He may very well have destroyed them. Properly destroyed them, this time. A King beyond compare when it came to the art of self-sabotage. Discontent, it would seem, in his simply being content.

_None of that self-pitying propoganda, now. If you wish to fix it, you get on out there and fix it. Instead of sitting here like a frog on a log, eating fistfuls of shortbread that you did indeed appropriate from the reception, but stored on the backseat as opposed to down the leg of your trousers._

With that in mind, Aziraphale resolved to brave the storm, retrieving his umbrella from out of the car boot and making ever the more refined show of getting over the barbed wire fence. Mainly on account of his using magic to get the fence to bow down just low enough for him to step on over without any of the difficulties Crowley had encountered.

That procedure having been rather the flawlessly executed, Aziraphale trundled off into what might better be described as a peat bog rather than a field in pursuit of a very emotional, likely now tetanus riddled demon.

The demon he shortly thereafter managed to locate, not so very far in surprisingly, hunkered under a couple of low lying willow trees. He was soaked, just as miserable looking as earlier and had both arms clutched tight bout his midsection. Every visible inch of his suit was caked with mud and there was dried blood forming a trail down from one corner of his lips to somewhere just below his chin.

"What happened?" Aziraphale asked, crouching so as to get in underneath the branches. The folliage was a little to the side of scraggly and the rain still petered through, so he kept the umbrella expanded above his head.

Crowley, still understandably in a bad mood with him, glared into the sodden earth somewhere off to the left. "... got kicked by a horse."

"What on earth were you doing so as to incite that sort of reaction from the horse?"

Crowley had the decency to look at least a little ashamed of himself. "... tried to kick it first."

Aziraphale, hardly the least surprised by the answer, crouched by Crowley's side and extended the umbrella out over his head. "And after all your talk of taking better care of yourself." He murmured, passing his hand over Crowley's midsection and healing the five fractured ribs and internal bleeding what the horses hoof had deservingly distributed. A second bypass cleared the blood away from his maudlin face and knitted the likely tetanus speckled cut on his shin.

"Weirdly enough I wasn't thinking about that in the heat of the moment." Crowley replied, in the expectant bitter tone one often resorted to when their life was falling to pieces. Aziraphale, uncertain even as to why he might have cause to defend himself, attempted to do so all the same.

"Crowley... I understand you're disappointed..."

"Don't want to talk about it, angel." Crowley said, pulling him up short. He did not look in any mood to be trifled with. Hair hanging limp about his mud spattered face, eyes red rimmed and sullen and a bottom lip that had a raw patch from being intermittently gnawed on and then fervently gnashed. "Just wanna go home. Get into a boiling hot bath equivalent temp about the core of the sun and wipe the memories of this day off of my dank, manure riddled skin."

Aziraphale could understand entirely where Crowley was coming from. But there was still much which needed to be said. He wanted to try to explain, as best as he could (what with his own limited understanding) what had earlier transpired.

"I... what I said in the car... I wasn't thinking clearly."

"Notice the distinct lack of surprise on my face to hear of an occasion in which you have not thought clearly, Aziraphale." Crowley said, with a huff that might have been amused if he still wasn't so heart sore and belligerent. Aziraphale, giving in to yet another brief flush of irritation, rose to his feet and gestured back out over the mud and mist blotted field.

"Look, can we _please_ just return to the car and talk this out in a more civilized setting? I'm hardly likely to compose myself in an appropriate manner with you sitting there wet and shivering and shaking - you're going to catch your death."

"I'm used to being left out in the cold, angel." Crowley struggled up onto his long limbs, ducking out from under the umbrella as Aziraphale attempted once more to shelter him beneath it. "Don't strain yourself. What bother is rain to me now?"

He strode proud and squealchingly into the field and Aziraphale, always two steps behind as usual, quickened his stride so as to keep up. With the one hand which wasn't retaining its grip on the umbrella, he struggled to free himself from his so far still dry and warm coat.

"Look, at least take my -" And the next thing he was aware of, was a slipping sensation under his feet and the overcast sky filling his vision. His back slammed the ground, hard enough to knock the air out of his lungs in spite of all the congealed squishiness he had at his disposal. "Aagh!"

At the sound of his outcry, Crowley instinctually whipped around and was greeted by the empty air which Aziraphale had only moments earlier occupied.

"Aziraphale-?" He glanced about a moment, clearly perplexed and started mentally working through the limited amount of options as to where Aziraphale might have disappeared to. Having concluded that gravity was a more than likely eventuation of a slippery situation, Crowley dropped his eyes down to find the angel, umbrella still somehow clutched resolutely in his right hand, supine in the mud and grass and thrashing about like a turtle what had been dropped onto its back. "What the Heaven happened?"

"Oh, I slipped over and..." Aziraphale managed to heave himself into a seated position and wrinkled his nose as a pungent odour saw fit to assault his ever so refined senses. He raised his left hand and with palpable horror, confirmed his worst fears. "Oh, I've only gone and landed in an enormous pile of horse shit!"

Crowley burst into peals of raucous, uncontrollable laughter. He laughed so hard, in fact, that he hadn't the strength with which to remain upright and needed to lean over so as to rest his hands atop his knees. Aziraphale, verily bedecked with mud, clay and poo a plenty, did not at all share in the perceived hilarity of the situation.

"Yes, I fancy it's all very amusing from where _you're_ currently standing!"

"I've never..." Crowley barely had air enough with which to speak. He looked very close, in fact, to toppling over onto the ground himself. "I've never heard you say horse shit before!"

Aziraphale made an attempt to get back up onto his feet, but the sole of his shoe managed to somehow locate the exact vein of clay as earlier and send him slipping squarely down onto his bottom. "Look, could you please perhaps relegate the hysterical laughter to a later time and just spare a second to help me up, please?!"

"Yeah, yeah all right. Hold your horses. _"_ Crowley said cheerfully, marching back towards Aziraphale with his hand charitably extended. "Here."

"Just be careful, there's a big patch of clay ri-"

For the sake of comedic coincidences, Aziraphale's warning came, as you might expect, moments too late; with one of Crowley's expensive new shoes alighting upon that self same slip of clay and sending him skidding along spectacularly a good four or so feet before upending him almost exactly alongside where Aziraphale himself was currently bogged.

"... right there." The angel concluded, wincing in anticipation of the demon's expectant outburst. He was not to be disappointed.

"Oh... for someone's sake!" Crowley groaned, struggling up out of the filth infused miasma and sniffing at his fingers. As you would expect, they too had found themselves the joyful recipients of the very same manure that Aziraphale had thus far enjoyed sole custody of. "What has this bloody horse been eating?! Cabbage and Indian curry?!"

"Well, it has been raining..." Aziraphale stated, thinking it very strange to question what a horse may or may not have been eating. Their dietary options were rather limited, after all.

"Aww, it's in my hair..." Crowley gave a violent, full body shudder, his face screwing up as though he had just sucked on an umeboshi plum. "Oh, it's gone down the back of my shirt!" He stared at his hands, redoubling his disconcertment and threw them up above his head with a demonstrative shriek. "Aaaaghh, it's everywhere! This is a new suit!" His eyes bugging all the wider, he pistoned one leg into the air, groaning with desolation at the sight which greeted him. "My shoes!"

Aziraphale, unable to help himself, indulged a small snort of laughter. Crowley naturally turned on him with all the mercy what might be demonstrated of the North Korean military.

"It's not funny, Aziraphale! These are nine hundred pound shoes!"

Shoes that Aziraphale had paid for, nonetheless but by the by. "Oh, I see. So it was funny when it was me flailing around in the horse manure and muck but it's a different story when the nine hundred pound snakeskin boot is on the other foot."

Crowley's ever mature response was to reach down, take up a good solid helping of the mud, clay and horse poo concoction and fling it vindictively towards Aziraphale's face. The angel stared, resisting the urge to gape his appalment, for want of the foul smelling mess that was currently navigating its way down off of his forehead and onto his cheek.

"Did you... really just do that?!"

Crowley, not quite believing it himself, had to think on it a moment. He decided, much as he often did with stupid things he had done, to go ahead and own it. Besides, he had just cause to be cranky and little that anyone could argue with that.

"Yep. And don't even pretend like you hadn't done anything to deserve it."

Aziraphale took a moment to consider this himself. Yes, he most likely did deserve it, that much was true. And it would have been more the considerate of him to have taken Crowley's very justifiable feelings of disconcertment into account and talked it out in a manner what was deemed appropriate for two venerable and ancient creatures such as themselves.

The only problem this assertion presented was that Aziraphale and Crowley were not venerable. They were ancient, certainly. But even ancient creatures can be given over to petty indulgences every once in a while.

Perhaps even the more so than humans. They had much greater time in which to make amends for personal slights and as such, gave much lesser consideration as to playing into their transitory feelings when so the urge took them.

That being said, Aziraphale shelved all that pretentious 'turn the other cheek' folderol Heaven would have him otherwise illustrate, took up a good steaming helping of the muck in which he was currently steeping and pitched it dead centre of Crowley's expensive, white shirt. The look on the demon's face was strangely satisfying, Aziraphale thought, for Crowley genuinely appeared as though he had no earthly idea as to how he was supposed to respond to being pelted with animal excrement.

"Oh." He finally spluttered, so out of sorts that Aziraphale could barely keep from laughing. "That's how it is, is it?! Right then."

He struggled up, long limbs slipping and sliding in the clay and the mud and managed to somehow inelegantly fling himself on top of Aziraphale, driving him down into the mushy earth. He hefted another handful of assorted nastiness and smashed it down on top of the angel's shock of white blond hair, making good and certain to rub it in as though it were coconut scented leave in conditioner.

"Get that right on up there in your halo, ya big winged pillock!" He jeered, having forgotten one very important, though hardly the least negligible thing before embarking on this particular venture. That Aziraphale had not been appointed Guardian of the Eastern Gate on account of his prodigious and unrivalled ability to spot misspellings in a newspaper crossword at a fifty yard radius. Certainly he may have been out of practice so far as combat was concerned, but the point was that he had practice. Something of which Crowley, in all his many incarnations, had seen precious little of.

As such, the demon found himself swiftly overpowered, launched over Aziraphale's shoulders by way of a knee what found purchase in the modest foundations of his narrow chest. The pouring rain swung any which number of ways as Crowley sailed through the air, landing yet again on his back with the greatest of indecency.

He might have been more the infuriated for it, if Aziraphale wasn't suddenly occupying his field of vision, hovering over him with an expression of outrage warping his usually soft and serene (currently manure fouled) features. He slammed his palms hard against Crowley's upper arms, dropping down to kneel between his legs in such a way that the demon could have windmilled them to his hearts content and exacted little in the way of lasting damage. Aziraphale was panting, sopping wet and his hair was dripping with mud and equine faeces and whoever only knows what else and Crowley could not imagine ever feeling more turned on by him.

"I can't even... to rub... excrement in my hair!" He shrieked, looking every bit like he wished he could just crawl right on out of his own skin and leave it behind in the filth. His fingers tightened about Crowley's arms and he lifted him just enough so as to slam his back into the ground again. The wind was knocked clear from Crowley's lungs. He felt the strength in Aziraphale's arms; ratcheting down through the breadth of his shoulders and his desires pitched to greater heights still. "What is _wrong_ with you?!"

Crowley stared up at him, a panting miasma of lingering anger and ever the more rapidly mounting lust. Aziraphale's own pinched features shifted; taking note of the position they were in. The very unusual fact that for the first time in over six thousand years, he and Crowley had engaged in something of a melee and it was the angel what had come out on top.

All those times in which Crowley had attempted to physically intimidate him and Aziraphale had permitted it; feeling that a response of equal energy was beneath him. Demonstrably un-angelic as it was so as to meet anger with anger.

He had always known, given how poorly Crowley faired even when dealing with off put, drunken humans, that the demon was far the more bark than he was bite and if it came down to the nitty gritty (such appropriate verbiage, considering) that Aziraphale would have little difficulty with putting him in his place.

He had not been wrong.

He ought not to have been so pleased by it, and he was not wrong.

And here was Crowley, not staring at him with fear or hatred but with yearning. His chest rising and falling with the sharp intake of expectant breath, hair and skin drenched with rain and filth. Eyes hooded and lower lip pouted and jutting so that a glimpse of his lower row of teeth could be seen.

His clothes were dishevelled, his once white shirt stained beyond the point of repair and drenched so completely that it outlined the pale singlet he wore beneath it.

His tie was hanging loose, his pants were torn and his hair was scruffed to every which way and flecked with grass and mud.

This was an Anthony J. Crowley with which style would _never_ wish to be acquainted.

"Look at you..." Aziraphale chuckled. "Never in all the years have I seen you look so..." He took one of his hands from Crowley's arm and lent it to the curve of his cheek. Smearing more mud and mess on him in the process. And it made no sense; for him to feel so completely suffuse with desire. No more than it did for Crowley to be lying there in the filth and the shit and the rain and to be somehow more beguiling than he had ever been in all the ages that had passed. "Oh... who am I fooling?"

He dropped himself down, wrapped his arms about whatever it was of Crowley he could lay claim to and imparted his kiss once more upon those plush and pliant lips. He felt the grip of the demon's hands to his shoulders and then his back, his knees pinching in so as to frame his waist. They were covered, moment by precious moment, in ever the more disgusting filth what resided in the earth of the field.

_I don't know what I was thinking, my darling,_ Aziraphale thought, turning his head so as to lend kisses to what parts of Crowley's neck weren't smeared with grime. He plucked apart the button he had earlier sequestered in place, setting his lips against the hallow of his throat. Feeling his heart patter at a much greater rate than the rain at the soft groan Crowley emitted; how he tilted his head back to invite further touches still. The way that his hips rolled so as to then give rise to the subtle arch of his back.

A future without knowing the taste of moments such as these was a bleak, purposeless one, Aziraphale knew. And he was every bit a liar if he were to pretend as though he did not thirst for it; did not wish to sink his teeth into its juicy, sumptuous centre, just as he had done with the apple all those many thousands of years ago.

Let the barbs jab at him from every which way they saw fit. For he said it himself; there was nothing stronger than what he felt for Crowley.

And Crowley was lovely. And sexy. And Aziraphale could no sooner deny him then he could deny his want of the world itself and all its plethora of earthly pleasures.

Pleasures they might yet have had more the time to explore, but they were not alone in that meadow and horses are habitually nervous creatures at the best of times. This particular one already had reason by which to be deposed to their presence and it was by sheer good luck alone (coupled with a magically conjured carrot which Aziraphale took rather too much pleasure at pretending to pull out from Crowley's ear) that they managed to get way without being trampled to death.

They returned to the car and wasted yet a little more magic with dry cleaning themselves before climbing back inside. Crowley may have been more than prepared to deal with whatever stains a spontaneous love making session might have bestowed upon the seat of the Bentley, but he was not about to tolerate his hand stitched leather being festooned with equine bowel movements and clay.

Still a little rumpled, down one umbrella but otherwise dry and safe, the angel and a demon took a moment with which to properly compose themselves; brushing back and tidying hair, straightening lapels and neck ties alike. Aziraphale was the first to chance a look and Crowley found it somewhat flattering to witness the small, self-satisfied smile the angel could clearly not contain.

"What I... said before..." He waited to see whether Crowley was going to interject but the demon simply glanced over, fingers pinched about the car key and gave him that slight, sensitive smile to which he was ever so accustomed. "I apologize. The pain made me speak out of turn and it's not at all how I truly feel. Nor what I truly _want._ You are worth it, my dear. Every inch of that pain." His cheeks felt pinched for how high his smile now rode into them. He felt replete with affection. Affection and desire both. "I can't envision a future now... where I won't feel compelled to kiss you just as soon as look at you. And there's little point in trying to pretend otherwise."

Crowley gave an amused sounding huff as he started the car. "Kind of got that. Considering you couldn't even keep from doing it when I was covered in horse shit." He looked back towards Aziraphale and softly added: "You gotta stop scaring me like that, angel. Every time you do... I feel like you're just... drifting back on over to the far side. I need you here. On our side."

"I know. And I'm sorry." Aziraphale reached across and took Crowley's hand up off of the wheel. Brought it to his lips and kissed the rise of his knuckles tenderly. "I love you. _So_ very much."

Crowley tilted his head, smiling. Relief threaded through him like needlepoint. "I love you too." He said.

They drove away from the field. The trip home was still a quiet one. But it was a happy one.

And, more to the point, it was a hopeful one.

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday, 13th of April - 6:15pm~** _   
_**Sunny Sanctum Hotel - London, Mayfair...** _

It was the sort of place that you might, in the old days, have paid for by the hour.

Beelzebub had paid for the night. They had used one of Gabriel's bank cheques.

Least the stupid angel could do, given the exhausting afternoon they had thoughtfully gifted the demon with in turn.

Humiliation. The gift what kept on giving.

"Oh... oh the room won't stop spinning... Oh and the novelty is starting to wear off..."

Beelzebub, eyes rolled back so far in their sockets they had just about lodged there, hefted Gabriel's enormous, inebriated body onto the rooms single bed like a bag of dirty laundry they were much begrudging the sorting of.

"Unbelievable... More paperwork than I can ever hope to get on top of, and here I am, nursing your stupid, arse..." They reached down, tugging the angel's wingtips off one at a time before taking hold of his cashmere scarf and yanking it so roughly from around his thick neck that it momentarily strangled him. "- the arse of which, I might add, izz currently drunk out of itz mind on one glass of chardonnay!" They glanced hopelessly about the room; a room what even the most hard up of cockroaches might have turned their antenna up at. "In a room that somehow manages to be less charming and more slimy than the office I have to go back to."

Gabriel groaned in perhaps the most obnoxious attention seeking manner the demon fancied they had ever heard; one hand braced over his face to shield his eyes from the inadequately dim light that the shade free bulb of the lamp was dribbling out.

"Lord, how do you make this stop?! Why do humans do this to themselves?"

"Becauze like mozt things, it feelz good whilst they are doing it, I suppoze." Beelzebub returned with a glass of water from the sink; located no less than two feet from the bed and attempted to hand it over. "Drink this."

Gabriel responded with a shriek which suggested he had just been unwittingly violated with a sand covered cucumber and rolled halfway across the bed in a pitiful effort to escape.

"I don't _want_ to drink anymore! I've had enough!" He hiccupped, belly down on a duvet which would most likely have glowed neon if someone waved an ultra-violent light over it. Much like every surface of the room would have done, in fact. "Ohhh… I'm not sure that rolling over like that was such a good idea..."

"This iz juzt _water_ , you idiot." Beelzebub said, holding up the glass and tapping their grimy fingernail against the side of it. "It'z going to make you feel better."

"That's what they all said about the alcohol. And now I just feel... dizzy and... disconnected and... vague and..." Gabriel paused a moment, his swirling brain making some surprising connection between the words he was saying. "You know... it _is_ actually better. I can't even... think about the things that I was supposed to be worrying about. All this... this other stuff is just... taking up all my attention." He gave a goofy laugh. "Who would have thought it?"

Beelzebub could hardly believe they had chosen this over returning to the office. Hell had never looked more the appealing than it did at that very moment. "Seriously, juzzt drink the fucking water before I tip it on your head."

Gabriel managed to heave himself up. "I will not..." He paused, momentarily startled by something what was rising up inside of him. He burped. He looked very surprised by the burp. It was the first he'd ever experienced and hadn't at all known what to expect. "-not take anything what is offered to me by a demon. You're... not to be trusted."

It had been a very long day. It had been a very long six thousand years. Beelzebub considered themselves a patient creature but all of this was well past the point of wearing thin. They expressed their feelings on the matter, by marching to the bedside table and slamming the glass down just hard enough to spout water over the rim.

"HEY!" They yelled, vaguely satisfied to see Gabriel shrink back from them with a look much like that of a chastised child. They did not often yell; raising your voice rather lost the intended effect if you made a habit of it. And Beelzebub made good and certain (bad and certain, rather) to roll it out only when they really needed to. Or, in this case, where they were quite simply at the end of their inexorable tether. "If you recall, _you're_ the one what made the decision to start imbibing in the firszzt place, archangel. And _I'm_ the one giving you the thing that'z going to help you feel better. To say nothing about that _horrendous_ conversation concerning how to take your very first..." They paused, pulling themselves together as much as their delineated dignity would allow. "...urination."

Gabriel was apparently just drunk enough not to share in the mortification of this experience. "That was _so_ frightening." He said, with an astonished gasp. "I came _this close_ to ruining this suit! And the look on that gentleman's face when he came into the water closet, I mean... what was _his_ problem?"

"I gathered from his expression that he was taking exception to _my_ being in there." Beelzebub surmised, given over to the assumption that most humans when looking at them, perceived them as being female. The small statue leant itself over to this inference, more the likely. "I was also providing instructions as to how to extract yourself from the zip in your trousers, so there's _that_ as well." They flicked a finger and the water zipped itself off of the side table and neatly into Gabriel's trembling right hand. "Drink that and try and get some sleep."

They straightened the strap about their shoulders and turned so as to walk out of the sad and dingy little room. Gabriel sat up straighter, swaying from side to side and looking every bit as lost as a small child in a shopping emporium whose mother had likely knicked off to the casino with her ill-gotten gains from the government coffers.

"You're leaving?"

"Of _course_ I'm leaving!" Beelzebub exclaimed, wondering all the while why it had in fact taken so long to dump the angel's limpet carcass. "What, you don't really ezpect me to stick around watching over your sorry form all night long? Maybe you don't have work what needz attending to, but the matterz of Hell haven't stopped ticking just becauze the world might be coming to an end a second time."

"It keeps you busy, doesn't it?" Gabriel said, surprisingly sympathetic in his drunken state. Beelzebub gave him a rather long, ostensibly bitch-faced look in return.

"You think?"

"You were never... not busy, though." The angel mused, carriage hopping squarely onto yet another train of thought, such was his limited spatial reasoning. "I remember. In Heaven. You were busy all the time then, too. I always felt bad... taking you away from your work."

"Don't start with all that." It was not so much a request, but an unequivocal demand. They couldn't start this now. Not now.

Much too late. Centuries too late.

"Maybe it wouldn't hurt to talk about it." Gabriel said, attempting to swing his legs over the side of the bed. He did not get very far and likely wouldn't have done, even if he had managed to haul himself to his feet. Beelzebub would have just kicked him straight back down onto the mattress for his efforts.

"And perhaps it wouldn't _help_ to talk about it either." The demon said, which would have been a clear sign to anyone other than the selectively deaf Gabriel that this was a topic of conversation what was off limits.

"Why do you keep... saying no to it?" The archangel challenged; more the resolute now that his inhibitions had been drowned under the flood of one standard glass of house chardonnay. "The... talking about it, I mean?"

"Because it iz easier for you, than it iz for me." Beelzebub snapped, resisting every natural urge they had to cross the room and bring the glass of water down sharply upon the crown of the angel's impudent head. "You've only ever _been_ the one way. The very same Gabriel from day dot. You've never lozt anything! Not like I did!"

"I lost you." Gabriel said softly and the admission was resounding enough to shock them both silent. They poised in the midst of that resultant quiet, absorbing the honest and heartbreaking complexity of the angel's three seemingly simple words. What may very well have been a rat lent a scratching paw to a pipe somewhere off in the hygienically substandard bathroom. They paid it no mind.

"Wow, this uh... this alcohol... it certainly makes one honest, doesn't it?" Gabriel said, leaning back on the bed and rubbing the fingers of his free hand across his aching forehead. Beelzebub offered him a questioning glance.

"This iz you being honest?"

"Well... yes, I..." He attempted to stand again, but thought better of it. Still too wobbly. Vision too wobbly. All of it... off balance. "You were among the very best of us, Raphael-"

Beelzebub clenched their eyes shut as pain lashed through the borders of their immortal soul. It could have been no more the effective than if Gabriel had taken a whip and lent a tyrannical lash to the metaphorical breadth of their back.

"Don't... call me that!"

"It was your name once." He said, with some small protest of innocence.

"Once. Once! Not anymore! _You_ saw to that! You burned that name away when your threw me into the sulphur!" And there it was; cascading out of them without pause, without want of their natural abide to inhibit and compress. Six thousand years of accumulated bitterness; heartbreak warped through the touch of damnation, had finally found its intended mark. "Without so much as a second glance, Gabriel! Raphael died that day. Not juzt in name, but in here!"

They jabbed a finger hard to their chest; a reverberation what sent the veiled flies soaring behind the earthly bonds. The buzzing filling the otherwise soothing plateau of their head and angered them further still.

"Everything what Raphael waz, every tiny piece of what made them them was burned into ash and then that ash roze as fliez and sorez and every tiny piece of dizguzt and despair that you felt for them, wove itself into the tapestry what made my condemned form, me! Beelzebub! _That'z_ the name you get to say now, Gabriel!"

They took a long, deep breath; their flesh aching and itching as it always did when the parasites wove their dreaded dance beneath.

"You know what they call me now? The Lord of Fliez. I was an Archangel of the starz. I gave birth to entire galaxies with my voice, with my song and with my breath. Planets burzt into being when I smiled; my fingertips wove tapestries of galaxies of distant nebulas. And because of you, my beautiful voice was burned into a cinder." They cupped a hand to their throat; a throat what had once possessed the cadence of a nightingale. "A cinder what rents my throat apart whenever I speak. I'll _never_ again be able to sing. To create life. Your dizgust... bled itself through me. Every last dizmal pore of me waz filled with the eggz of maggotz and all that I could then give life to was the fliez that rose from those surfeiting seedz."

The resentment rose up, gave life to the true, unearthly form of Beelzebub. So that Gabriel could witness, for the first time, what he himself had been complicit in creating.

The skin blistered and alive with sores and the bodies of grotesquery's unseen and marching to a tenebrous beat within. Flies circling and humming mercilessly about a head what held the vestiges of frayed and burned hair. Hair what had once been long and luxurious; what would flow through the air as though drifting through water. Deadened cruel affect, skin sallow and sunken and writhing with the pestilence of damnation.

"See here, what you gave credence to. Yes?" The demon raised twisted hands, bedecked by the ragged stumps of blackened nails towards their terrible, tortured face. "My lashez once long and thick; burned from my face. My hair what once reached the floor scorched and frayed. My eyez what were once bright, now az cold as the cutting slate of ice. My skin clean, now covered in sorez, my voice once clear now coarse, my lips once claim to a virtuous smile now too heavy to raise itself from the tomb into which it has long since been buried." They held their arms out wide; inviting the angel to look upon them without fear. "See now, with your infallible eyez, the full extent of God'z everlasting mercy. Like staring into the void, iz it not, Archangel Gabriel? Az the void starez back at you. _"_

They had expected that the shock of it all would be enough to render the angel speechless. Would undo him, much as he had undone they themselves all those years ago.

And it was true that Gabriel was quiet for some moments following their outburst. But he was not silent for nearly so long as the demon might have expected.

"I do believe that... even now...in this place of incontestable sadness, that you are, as you have always been, the most divine of all of God's creations. There is no void into which I stare." He looked out over the ravaged form of Beelzebub, with the very same eyes what he always had. Nothing had changed there but for the unfamiliar kindness what was not of Heaven's making, but every inch an impart of his own underivative soul. "I see you."

The darkness distilled itself. Receded back from whence it came. Beelzebub remained in the wake of it; restored once more to their human form and struck numb and silent and unquestionably baffled. They stared at Gabriel, much as they might have done all those distant millennia ago and that soft, warm pull of Heaven tightened its hold, stretched to fill them.

As though a hand were reaching out...

Reaching out to invite them back in...

The cord broke as Gabriel blinked, eyes dropping so as to stare at the cheap, stained and cigarette burned carpet between his sock wreathed feet. He placed his fingers against his forehead in a tentative way what made him appear small and vulnerable.

"I feel like... there is something this body needs to do... to feel... better..."

Beelzebub gave themselves a thorough mental shake down and approached the bed. They were softened somewhat by the angel's declaration and it seemed the least they could do, to tuck him into the likely louse riddled bed so that he could sleep the effects of the meagre amount of alcohol off.

"Well... that'z fine, then. You should let it happen. Here. Juzt lie back." They took the glass of water, set it aside and then placed their hands to each of Gabriel's broad shoulders. They started guiding him backwards, attempting to steer his mammoth body up towards where the clipboard thin pillows were situated. "Juzt go with it."

"All right..." Gabriel said, seconds before he lurched upward and vomited spectacularly down the fronts of both himself, Lord Beelzebub and the side of a bed which had more the likely seen far worse in its time.

The Lord of the Infernal regions, venerate sire of darkness and despair and currently instated head of all Hell was stood there, dripping with celestial vomit from tiny head to near tiny toe, eyes bulging from their head and mouth gaping so widely that if one of their flies were to come loose from their bonds, it would have very likely skittered on inside the eagerly proffered awning of offense.

"Are you... are you _fucking kidding me?!"_ They shrieked, floundering back from the bed with their spew covered arms held out to either side of their body like a seagull hurling itself out of an oil slick. "It'z not enough that you throw me into Hell, now you go and _vomit_ all over me?!"

"I'm... I'm so sorry..." Gabriel gurgled, chin shiny with second hand chardonnay and stomach acid. His slackened face suddenly brightened. "You're right, though. I feel _much_ better!"

With an incensed groan, Beelzebub reached down, grabbing the angel's muscular right arm and wrapping it about their own slender shoulders. "Come on." They said, dragging him up off of the bed with a strength that was clearly out of proportion to their own diminutive statue.

"Where are we going?"

" _You're_ getting in the shower, you useless lump." Beelzebub said, steering the archangel's heavy, somnolent form over to the adjacent room and all but hurling him onto the black mould bedecked grouting. "And I'm... killing myself or something, I don't know."

It was the sort of situation Lord Beelzebub might ordinarily have walked away from. Permit the idiot angel to choke on the results of his own poorly made decisions, wiped their hands clean of the entire sordid event and called it a day.

But turning a blind eye was ever the more an angelic trait than it was a demonic one. Always had been.

And it was the very fact that Gabriel's own eyes seemed to be slowly starting to shed that differential blindness, what gave even a tired old demon like Beelzebub, pause.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: If you're reading this then congratulations! You have successfully managed to get through the contents of which I have previously referred to as the cursed chapter! If you dealt with it okay, I believe you have earned your stripes and are more than ready to tackle everything else what is due to come! :D
> 
> A few more updates will be taking place tomorrow! Thanks again as always everyone, and I will see you next time!
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~xxx ooo


	38. Or, where the stones begin to fall.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Their internal reassurances were of little use to the anxious cherubim. The cherubim who was laughing with nervous disbelief, having honestly no idea as to where any of this information had come. 
> 
> All of his sums had been meticulously balanced over the hundreds of years he had been toiling away with the internal workings of the galaxy. He had gone over them, millions upon millions of times, with the celestial mental equivalent of a fine toothed comb. He had done this, so as to be certain that there was no way that the Creationist Accord could be violated.
> 
> He had to be certain. Because he could not run the risk that all his work could be...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yet another instance in which I fall short! I sincerely planned on having a few updates out in the one go today, but as I am Australian and it was Australia Day here and (more importantly) my aunt has just bought a brand new beautiful house, we all naturally took to celebrating with her :) This house has also come part and parcel with an outdoor, heated, salt water pool, so naturally me and the hubby and the fam got a lot of swimming, flipping, dunking, laughing and of course, awkwardly attempting to mount inflatable pineapple's all the whilst concerning oneself with the state of their questionable bikini region, done. The bane of an over thirty woman's life, oy vay...
> 
> Hence, not a lot of updating and or writing was completed today. It IS a public holiday tomorrow however, SO... fingers crossed I can make up for lost time then!
> 
> In any event; I hope that all my lovelies enjoy this very small, historical update! xxx ooo

* * *

**~X~**

**_~Heaven - Architectural Division~_ **   
**_Some years prior to the Rebellion..._ **

The cherubim floated thoughtfully across the upper trajectory of the galaxy; fingers set to his chin as he took apart every perceivable inch of the projection with a critical eye.

Pride was a sin and yet he was as proud of his creation as what an angel was permitted to be.

He had worked on the galaxy for centuries now and the end was at long last within reach. A few decades of concentrated effort and he could then polish the edges, balance the equations and prepare it for presentation to the Head Architect Raphael and the affiliate Board of Directors.

His appearance was one of utmost poise and reservation but inside, the cherubim was softly bubbling away with excitement. Since the time of his creation, he had served as an assistant to any number of creationist projects; both grand and modest in scale alike. All the while, he would toil at his individual project where time permitted; hours, days, years and then centuries sunk into something which at long painfully last, he could finally begin to see bearing fruit.

The cherubim slipped down through the protective membrane what encased the borders of the prospective galaxy. Architects were accustomed to drifting about the circumference of their projects, and so they dressed in a far the more practical fashion than most other angels; especially those showier types what were relegated to military rotation. An architects robes were sleeveless, so as not to inhibit the often dramatic delineations of their arms; for their workspaces were tightly hewn and the nature of their work delicate. The base of their attire was designed so as to create separate pockets for their legs; a means of preserving their ethereal dignity as they went about their business.

The cherubim was particularly grateful for this. He was currently working at the upper most quadrant of the galaxy and this required that he remain upside down for extended periods of time. Primarily, so as to maintain superior visual acuity, and also so as to further prevent him from inadvertently interfering with his earlier formations.

He reached carefully through the swirling nebula and plucked from within a planet, what was, in its conceptual state, small enough to fit between two delicately pinched fingertips. He eased it free, with about as much deliberate attention as an earth scientist might one day ascribe to the splitting of the atom.

He took from the upper breast pocket of his robe a small gold rimmed lens and squeezed it into place over his eye; pressing his brow down so as to hold it in place. He used the magnifier to check over every infinitesimal inch of the tiny planets surface, murmuring complex calculations to himself which no one, sans perhaps he and Raphael would ever have a hope of translating into something what made sense.

The cherubim rolled the planet about between the bridges of his fingers playfully. It slipped between each knuckle like a coin, before he then pinned it back between his index and middle finger. He raised it, to just offside of his cheek and ghosted a breath of air out from the corner of his lips. Magic reeled outwards, forming about the tiny planet a beautiful, perfect ring in shades of limpet pink and hues of brightest yellow.

"What a lovely thing."

If the cherubim had not been so practiced in regulating his nerves, he might very well have dropped the planet down into the swirling vortex of the galaxy where could have affected its own miniature version of a big bang. As it was, he managed to maintain his grip on it, holding firm on the position in which he was currently levitating and glanced slowly about so as to see who was that was speaking.

The Principality Aziraphale, Second-Tier General of the Twenty-Seventh regiment, was hovering just outside of the borders of the workspace; hands set behind his back in a poise what conveyed consummate respect and a smile which said that he was genuinely impressed by what he was witnessing.

The cherubim might have normally been concerned by a visit from the Militia. Theirs was business what rarely boded well, especially where the artistic demographic of Heaven was concerned. The militia were charged with maintaining order within the celestial realm and bouts of creative indulgence or ambition were more often than not viewed as being a threat to Heavenly ordinance.

It was God alone, after all, whom had the singular right to creation. Well... she and the Vices and the Virtues, of course. They had created Heaven and all of the angels. It was they and they alone who held the monopoly regarding the installation of independent life; of the creation of the immortal soul.

The military had a long, historical distrust of the more free-thinking artisans; of which the architects were indisputably the crowning glory of their 'shit list'. The artisan's what were charged with the creating of accompanying universes, of stars and planets and, in the case of Raphael, the Earth itself.

Artisan's did not believe in corralling their creativity. They were well known for their impudence; their unabashed desire to challenge and further expound upon their abilities; to reach just that enth degree further where possible, to see what might eventuate if a never before thought of prospect was to be explored.

This philandering mindset did not sit at all well with the rigidly governed providence of the military, and if either branch had been in possession of horns, they would most certainly have been locked on the more than one occasion.

But if there was one member of the military whom was warmly accommodated within the architectural workspace, it was incontestably the Principality Aziraphale. Though he was regarded as a both fine and astute soldier, he was further the more considered to be perhaps the most fair minded of the upper echelons and seemed to have a particular interest in surveying the developing projects of the artisan's, simply out of pure, innocent minded intrigue.

The cherubim had never spoken to Aziraphale personally, but he was instantly recognizable by his trademark shock of white hair and the warm smile what was replete with teeth that were whiter still. His was a soft and gentle aura, which seemed all the more wasted to the hard-line what he was designated to toe for all eternity.

"Oh... this? Pssh..." The cherubim remarked, feeling a little self-conscious as he carefully slotted the tiny, now ring wreathed planet back where it belonged and pocketing the monocle as an afterthought. "Just a silly galaxy..."

"It seems very intricate to me." The Principality mused; an observation which evoked an unintended snort from the Cherubim in response. He immediately wished that he could go back in time and slap his hands over his foolish mouth, for if there was one thing the military did not take kindly to, it was insolence.

"With all due respect," The cherubim said, easing himself out from the preservation membrane and rotating so that he was now facing the right way up. "What would a soldier know of intricacies?"

He rather expected that Aziraphale would chastise him; for it would have been precisely what any other of the jackboots might have done. But the Principality continued to surprise him; maintaining still that soft, unwavering smile as he looked over the densely populated workspace and all its swirling, glistening accruements.

"I'm no different to any angel. I understand what is pleasing to the eye." He said kindly. The sensitivity was a little destabilizing for the cherubim, who had been preparing himself for any number of blunt demands or remonstrations in return for his cheek. He wasn't at all sure as to how to follow on from this. Usually the military angels cared little for the aesthetics of the piece and simply wanted a layman's blow by blow account as to how the project would be of service to the Lord's universe.

It was rare indeed for one to show interest in more than just the schematics.

"Needs to be a lot more than just pleasing to the eye." The cherubim remarked, watching the Principality with about as much curiosity as the latter had taken to observing the swirls of the suspended galaxy. It seemed somehow important to him, that Aziraphale was aware of how much work had gone into something like this. He might have been the only member of the militia who actually cared to be educated of such things. "Lot of maths goes into it. Planet density, core temperatures, estimations of ecosystemic progression, surface pressure, distance between affiliate planets, orbital trajectories, magnetic properties of the moons, topographical delineations, so on and so forth and on and on she goes." He tucked a long strand of curly brown hair back into the messy top knot which he had hastily shovelled it into before commencing his work. Felt a smile form on his face, as the smallest sliver of pride worked its path through him. "I've been... working on this one a while."

"Oh, yes?"

Aziraphale appeared genuinely interested. And so the cherubim found himself continuing to talk; to blather really. Most of the other architects cared especially little for what they had labelled as his 'pet project', though Raphael seemed to think that it had the trappings of a solid foundational galaxy. The opportunity however, to share his work with someone who actually went to the effort of even just being polite was... irresistible.

"Over seven hundred years now." The cherubim drifted across, so that he wasn't required to project his voice loudly over the workspace. There were plenty of other architects working on their own individual projects and it was vital to be quiet and courteous. "I've uh... I've done some work on Alpha Centauri's A and B, but this... this one here's mine." He shrugged modestly. "Just an idea. Raphael and the council get final say, of course but if it all goes off without a hitch, it might open some doors for me. Know I'd never got a shot at something like the Earth project; that'd be shooting too high! But there are some neighbouring galaxies I wouldn't mind having the opportunity to collaborate on. Andromeda, for example... could write my own ticket with that to my name!"

He trailed off, feeling somewhat honestly relieved for there being a reason as to do so. That reason came in the noisy, disruptive entrance of the Archangels Raphael, Michael and Gabriel and the Seraphim Sandalphon exiting from out of Raphael's workshop. They appeared to be in the midst of a very heated debate, which the cherubim understood to be serious because Raphael was the first and foremost to abide by the rules when it came to respecting the shared workspace.

"They don't look happy." He stated, thinking it a rather pointless observation given that the group looked about ready to start tearing one another's feathers out.

"They do not." Aziraphale concurred and he gestured with his head, inviting the cherubim to descend along with him. The closer their feet came to touching the white marble what composed the floor of the workspace, the more that the argument of their affiliate angels gained clarity.

"- a blatant knee jerk reaction." Raphael was saying; the long mercurial braid of their hair snapping tight to the line of their narrow back as they strode towards the cherubim's workspace. Though they were far the more modestly statured whence compared to their fellow Archangels, they had been gifted by God with the most brilliant of minds and had been charged with the overseeing of all developmental practices; predominantly those pertaining to works belonging to the artisans and the architects.

Theirs was a mind what would have been impossible to have accurately measured by human standards. Raphael was able to calculate any number of possible or seemingly impossible equations, sums or theorems no matter how the improbable, all at the same time, whilst deconstructing and reconstructing the foundations of an entire universe with the one hand which wasn't occupied with completing any other complex task you might have thought to have tossed their way. Such as a Rubik's cube, 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle of a wheat field or a nine by nine square Calcudoku puzzle.

They were, as a result of said brilliantness, near the impossible to argue with and ever the more likely to have won whatever exchange they entered into.

The fact that they looked so unequivocally irritated did not bode well, the cherubim knew.

"I'm sorry, Raphael," Gabriel said and he did look somewhat sorry. This was more the likely as a result of his obvious affection for his fellow Archangel, more so than the whatever it was that they were arguing over. "But this is out of my hands."

"You have the direct line of enquiry to the Almighty, Gabriel. If you simply saw fit to make this your business-"

"Raphael, please." Michael urged and the cherubim felt his soul shrivel inside of himself. Michael was the Overseer of the entire Heaven based militia and you could guarantee that whatever business had forced them to pay a personal visit, was very, very bad business indeed. "You are being unreasonable."

Raphael, as fierce as they were astute, just about crammed their index finger up the other Archangel's nose. "Michael, if I was speaking to you, I would have been looking at you. _Know your business_."

It was the sort of exchange that got the artisans to all but quivering with excitement. Too often the military simply swanned on in and got their way where the more gentle hearted creative sorts dwelt. Raphael had always been one to stand up for the quote-unquote 'underdog' and they were impressively fierce when they got the bit between their teeth.

Michael did not allow for this chastisement to derail them from their previous point. "We have had the numbers run and the numbers do not lie."

_"_ Who ran your numbers?" Raphael asked, their large, blue eyes widening in a very pointed way which said that whatever answer was coming was going to be the wrong one.

"That's not important-"

"Do not presume to tell me what is important, Michael. In all of Heaven there is no one angel more capable of equating those figures than I and I have kept a close eye on this project since the date of its inception and nothing suggests that any of the prospective planets violate the Creationist Accord."

"Creationist Accord?" The Cherubim finally found his voice. He looked around at the temperamental gathering, the lines in his voice creasing with concern as he slowly directed his finger about so as to point to the swirling canvas of his pet project. "Are you... is this... m-my work you are talking about?"

"Your project violates several articles contained therein the Creationist Accord." Said Sandalphon, who had never been the one to mince words. All this in spite of just how suited his gold plated indentures seemed to be for mincing.

"Wh-what articles?" The Cherubim asked, with an expression so desperately afraid that Aziraphale could not help but feel sorry for him. His green eyes especially, looked even larger than they had upon initial inspection and were now shiny, as though he were just barely holding back tears. "I don't understand."

Michael made their way over to the hovering silver panel what was used to store the complex calculations what formed the base program of the galaxy. They used their finger to steer the projection out of sight, flicking through any number of affiliate mathematical equations and base formula's with such an indelicate manner that it brought the more sensitive likes of Raphael and the cherubim to flinching with associated concern. It was like watching a bear trying to drink from a delicate porcelain teacup.

"Planet 36JU," Michael at long last declared, coming across the apparent formula of which they had been searching and flicking upwards so as to convey the proposed projection into the workspace. A planet appeared; seemingly bland, dry and innocuous in its appearance. Aziraphale could hardly at all imagine why it would be of considered of any significance at all. "After so many cyclic rotations of the galaxies yellow dwarf, this planet has the potential of falling into alignment with a celestial trajectory what would allow it to then autonomously formulate an atmosphere what would be capable of producing water and developing a fully functional ozone layer. The projections what we have run indicate that after so many thousands of years in the maintaining of this trajectory that the planet would be in a perfect subsidiary state to develop an ecosystem what may support life."

"Artificial evolution." Sandalphon added, with great emphasis. In case the offense had not yet been made obvious. "Seeds of life what have not been directly sown by the Almighty herself."

"A direct violation of the Creationist Accord, to which all architects are bound to observe." Michael rounded off, as Raphael, in the background, closed their eyes in momentary dismay before then getting a firm grip on themselves. They had been possessed of a moment of self-doubt, but these few seconds alone had been enough for them to have gone over everything they knew about the project in their head and they understood that the possibility of which the asinine militia were speaking was highly implausible.

Their internal reassurances were of little use to the anxious cherubim. The cherubim who was laughing with nervous disbelief, having honestly no idea as to where any of this information had come. All of his sums had been meticulously balanced over the hundreds of years he had been toiling away with the internal workings of the galaxy. He had gone over them, millions upon millions of times, with the celestial mental equivalent of a fine toothed comb. He had done this, so as to be certain that there was no way that the Creationist Accord could be violated.

He _had_ to be certain. Because he could not run the risk that all his work could be...

"Oh. Oh no _._ No, I see where you're becoming confused. No." Laughing, the cherubim went into damage control; whipping himself over to the panel and bringing up all sorts of complicated looking formulas, which he took to pointing to as though they might have made some sense to the uneducated. "You see, a planet on its own is not at all capable of supporting life independently, even if it enters a perfect orbital trajectory from the galaxies star. There are so many other contributory factors what need to be present for life to form upon the surface. All the conditions need to align perfectly, which is a mathematical improbability." He glanced his fingers off of his forehead, with a desperate chuckle. "None of us, even Raphael would be capable of devising a singularity what would result in the infinitesimal aligning of all the myriad circumstances what would be required so as to result in evolutionary life. Take for example, the size and core temperature of the sun."

He brought up now an image of his galaxies hypothetical sun and all the sums what composed its base workings.

"Too large and it burns itself out too quickly, too small and the surrounding planets are subject to devastating blasts of coronal mass ejections, what would render the surface unsuited to sustaining life. This star is two hundred thousand miles lesser in circumference than the sun what is due to be installed within the Milky way. Not to mention-" He was babbling now, he knew. If a celestial body was capable of sweating, he might have been sweating bullets. "-that the, uh... the axis of rotation to its orbital planes, so as to produce the passing of seasons, the presence of a counter balance of the moon, which affects the tides..."

He took a breath that he didn't need but that everyone looked the relieved for him having indulged all the same.

"I mean... creating the Earth is one thing, right? That was intentional. That was something of which only Raphael and God were capable. I'm not... I mean, it would be impossible for me to in any way reproduce the same results. Even accidentally, the chances of any planet I create having the capacity to somehow acquire all those millions of tiny required factors what it would take so as to both produce and sustain life would be a... a fluke!"

Michael flicked a finger intemperately across the panel, shutting it off entirely.

"You don't need to talk us through your maths, architect. Person's far the more qualified than yourself have already run the numbers and estimated that the probability of planet 36JU transmuting into a state what could then sustain life stands at 0.05%."

"But that's... that's nothing." The cherubim was still wearing a somewhat silly grin which made him look as though he were truly expecting for all of this to be some sort of tasteless joke. Aziraphale was feeling more and more the sorry for him by the minute.

"No." Michael said firmly. "That is _something._ Something's can all too quickly become something 'more's.. And something more's are the provision and the privilege of the Almighty alone. Not that of nobody architects."

"This is outrageous." Raphael looked very, very tired, which was hardly a surprise, given the enormity of their workload. "I demand to speak with whoever it was what ran these numbers on your behalf. I assure you that your estimations are off."

Michael's face remained impassive. "They are not."

"Who are you to say?" So challenged the smaller archangel. A challenge which Michael rose to, walking slowly across the slim space what separated them and ensuring full well that Raphael was very aware of the physical discrepancy between their celestial bodies.

"Is that distrust I sense, Raphael?"

"I believe that you have simply selected the wrong people for the wrong task, dear Michael." Raphael said evenly, who, to their credit, did not so much as flinch as the larger archangel orbited into their personal space. "It is I who is best suited to look over the calculations. It was God Herself who saw fit to gift me with the mind what is greatest still amidst all Her beloved subjects." They looked very much the pointedly towards Gabriel, who rather the more seemed to be wanting to be anywhere but right there. "You know this. You know I am most suited. I will look over the project. I will examine everything from the ground up. I simply request time in which to do so."

Their appeal, though earnest and reasonable, fell on ears what were rendered deaf by the propriety of duty. Order had never been maintained through the weakening of stipulations and the granting of concessions. And now was not the time in which that premise was going to be shaken.

"Even a minute possibility is still minute. The chances are too great." Michael snapped their fingers above their head, gesturing, it seemed, towards Aziraphale. "The project must be dismantled."

The cherubim felt panic now for the very first time. It did not seem real to them; the very idea that hundreds of years worth of work... _No._

_... no..._

"Raphael?!" He cried, stepping backwards so as to press himself protectively over the panel what contained the entirety of the galaxy. His work... every tiny, complex piece of work of which he had toiled and shed as close to blood as an angel could shed was contained within that panel.

He had never loved anything like he loved this project of his. Nothing, not even the clothes on his back belonged to him.

But he had created this thing. He had created it. It had to mean something, it had to! It couldn't just be taken away!

"Have some compassion," Raphael pleaded. It was a pain shared, to see one of their charges so utterly devastated, so terrified beyond recourse. "The poor thing has worked on this for over seven hundred years now."

"Raphael, see reason. It's just a galaxy, after all." Gabriel said smoothly. Uncomprehendingly. "We've already got plenty of those. What's one more?"

"But I've put everything I have into this!" The cherubim cried out as Sandalphon took him about the wrist and yanked him away from the panel. His feet near about left the floor. His celestial body had nothing in the means of fighting back against angels whose entire existence was centred around the honing of their combat skills and all his struggling was for little purpose other than to annoy the Seraphim.

"You will find other work with which to busy yourself. Plenty of other projects you can provide assistance with." Michael gestured, impassively towards Aziraphale. "Aziraphale? Shut it down."

Aziraphale, who looked genuinely very sorry for his being involved in any of this at all, approached the panel, raising the hand what possessed the god given golden ring. He pressed his thumb against his ring finger and applied pressure.

A hand clamped suddenly about his wrist. He had no idea as to how the cherubim had managed to wriggle free from Sandalphon, but he had succeeded somehow.

Time seemed to have frozen within the room. Nothing was moving. Not the other angels, not the swirling of the accompanying projects in the affiliate workspaces, nothing.

Only the two of them.

"You said it was lovely." The cherubim urged and Aziraphale felt himself being drawn hypnotically into the pull of those enormous, light green eyes. Felt the pressure between his fingers slacken, just as much as his convictions seemed to be doing; like thread pulled free one piece at a painful time. "Please. I've put so much into this. I can change the math. It's not much work, not really. I can fix it." Tears slipped down over the lower lashes and cast a desperate crescendo across the angels cheeks. A cheek what he set fleetingly to the pale underside of Aziraphale's wrist. "Please, I'm begging you. Please don't destroy it. It's the only thing what's ever been mine. Please."

Everything started to move again, the silence broken with the painful sounding thump of a fist striking flesh. Aziraphale blinked, bringing himself back to reality.

He realized that the cherubim had not in fact moved at all; Sandalphon still had a hold of his arm and it had simply been some means of a spell by which he had spoken with Aziraphale.

The cherubim was now bent in the middle, eyes creased shut in pain. He had apparently been on the receiving end of a clout to the stomach; dispensed by Sandalphon when he had realized that the angel was incorporating some manner of spell with which to communicate with the Principality. This having been dealt with, Michael made yet another, lazy gesture with their hand, urging Aziraphale on.

"Gabriel." Raphael said firmly, taking one last attempt at getting him to intervene. But the messenger of the Lord God continued to stare straight ahead, unresponsive.

"Nothing belongs to you, architect." Michael stated, with eyes that never had and perhaps never would, hint at the foreign concept what was compassion. "All creation is property alone of the Almighty. You have no rights of possession. Nothing is yours."

With one final remorseful glance towards the cherubim, Aziraphale directed his energy into the much beloved, print marked panel and snapped his fingers. All the millions of hours of theoretical blood sweat and tears contracted violently before, with a violent flush, exsanguinating into a brilliant rush of sparks and ash, what faded resolutely and silently into the vacuum.

A void was all what remained where once the beautiful and intricate galaxy swirled. And the cherubim who had created this incontestably lovely thing was screaming; screaming as though having witnessed the merciless slaughter of a beloved child, slipping down out of Sandalphon's arms as if every bone had been torn from his eternal body, one at a torturous time.

"Why?!" He moaned from amidst the choking, desolate waves of anguish. It was a word what would resonate in the ageless eon of time what was the privilege and the curse of all those who called themselves immortal.

_Why do you do this to us?_

_Why do you do this to yourselves?_

_Why?_

_Why, why, why, WHY?_

"Bite that impudent tongue of yours until it forms a fork." Michael leaned close so as to hiss their words into an ear what was never closed off. "Never ask why."

They might have struck him, but there was no need. There was no more the exquisite a lesson what might be taught than that which had already been exacted. No pain what might compare to the despair what wrapped about the angels soul such as the torque of barbed wire.

Michael gestured the once more and Sandalphon followed wordlessly at their summons. The Principality Aziraphale hesitated, his gaze cast to the miserable, inconsolable form of the cherubim, as he turned the small gold band about his pinkie finger with itinerant purpose.

"Is that how you get off?" Raphael murmured softly, casting their eyes sidelong at Gabriel's stalwart figure. "Making the likes of one of God's most cherished cry?"

Gabriel, who more often than not wore a face of granite, seemed to have been somewhat the chipped away by Raphael's disapproval. Nonetheless, he shrugged the weight of the questions off, much as he had always done.

"I shall speak with you soon." He murmured, leaning down so as to place a kiss to the round curve of Raphael's soft cheek. They permitted him to do so, though refused to look at Gabriel as he turned now and left the room. All their attention was instead focused on their poor, devastated charge; who pressed to the floor in place of the hold they might have sanctioned about the remains of their beloved project.

"Try and not despair." Raphael said consolingly, placing their hands about the cherubim's shuddering, grief buckled shoulders. "There are thousands of projects of which a mind such as yours would be of exemplary benefit. I can see to it that any of them would be open to your inclusion."

"Please..." He sniffed, not so as able to raise his head just then. The despair was so absolute, so _crushing_... a loss he could only pray was without compare. "Just let me be."

Raphael accepted that this was time what they required in which to process their grief and so, with but a stilted glance Aziraphale's way, they drifted back to their own quarters; mind already the churning with a myriad of deliberations.

The Principality once more turned the ring about on his finger. "My dear... I am most dreadfully sorry for your loss." He did not know what else to say. Only knew that he ought to say _something._

"What do your apologies mean, Principality?" The Cherubim replied bitterly. He raised his head from the floor to beset eyes upon his fellow angel that were red and utterly unparalleled in their exquisite misery. "They are empty. As empty as your mind, and as empty as your soul."

It was hardly a subtle means to spur his departure and so Aziraphale sought to take his leave. As he turned, feeling something like regret driving its heel into his celestial heart, the cherubim's devastated words found him once more and they echoed inordinately in the already questioning avenues of his mind.

"One day, Jackboot," He said. "Your kind will push us too far. You can only take so much, before something is taken in return."

What had occurred that day had sown a seed of potent discord in the once quiet cherubim's chest. Little did he know, that in but a few weeks time, he would be presented then with the opportunity to oversee the execution of yet another project.

It was a project what the gentle minded cherubim might usually have declined, given its blatantly abhorrent nature. But from small seeds, grow wild untameable vines and this was a vine what wended its way throughout the angels mind; fracturing bonds what might have once held as fast and seemingly as unyielding as stone.

So much had been taken. And for once, the angel what was to become known as Crowley, wished very much to take in return.

* * *

**~X~**


	39. Or, in which a heat wave comes to London.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was desire there. A want to possess. Crowley could not help but to imagine how those hands would feel if cupped to other parts of his body. Hands what could so gently cradle an aged book, belied a quiet, unassuming strength. A strength what was in the same breath sensuous and carnal and profoundly, exquisitely erotic.
> 
> Crowley ached to feel that touch to each side of his hips, curled about his waist, up behind his shoulders even. Held, cradled, even jerked and yanked hither and thither under sway of a heated moment. A hand inching up the back of his neck, like a spider traipsing its own wayward, spidery path and fingers burying deep into the locks of his hair, tugging backwards so that hard that his scalp hurt...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay pepes, it is coming down to crunch time and since I do consider myself a person what always (within reason) follows through with their promises, I have absolutely no intention of letting you down and not getting at least a LITTLE new content out before the close of January. As such, here is my plan of attack for the next few days:
> 
> Step 1.) Today, I will post seven updates. I will do this the second that I have edited each of them, so they should be released in very short succession to each other. These will be posted on today's date (which, where I am in the world is the 27th of January) but keep in mind this may be one day behind for those of you in other parts of the world.
> 
> Step 2.) Tomorrow (the 28th of January) I will post six updates in a row.
> 
> Step 3.) On January the 29th I will post the final two updates, which will be the last of the original content. These two 'chapters' will include the NSFW content, and so they get to sashay on out together like a prom date gone messy.
> 
> Step 4.) On January the 31st (which is Friday in my neck of the woods) I will post Chapter 54 which is the first of the brand new content!
> 
> That is the plan, my lovelies! I was kind of hoping I could squeeze it down to three steps, so it could be a three stage plan (all ironical, you know) but alas, twas not meant to be!
> 
> Also, some warnings for this chapter: Sexual references, um... perhaps a little NSFW stuff there at the beginning? It is POST stuff happening so, not sure how much it counts, but if a teacher and or workplace manager were to look over your shoulder and see it, it might be considered a little to the side of dodgy. Let's go with that :) 
> 
> Okay - *Rolls up sleeves, claps hands together, sending up sparks* - time to get this show off the road ;)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 8:16am~** _   
_**London Airport** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

It is said, by some, that the world will end in either fire or ice.

Both, are in fact, true.

The Apocalypse what was intended to have been brought about by the likes of the Antichrist Adam, called for the dramatization of which flames alone would suffice. Well, flames what are brought about by multi-national nuclear exchanges, you might say. And those really weren't flames so much as enormous dramatic explosions what left little more than frightened looking shadows enmeshed with the pock marked earth and a world bequeathed to the likes of single celled organisms, cockroaches and those intolerable people who had hidden themselves in doomsday bunkers with the entire nations supply of tinned dog food and curry flavoured tuna fish.

The contingency plan called for a different approach. A 'do-over is a dish best served cold' sort of approach.

It makes sense. Or rather, it makes a great deal of sense when you look at it from the perspective of applied balances.

Hell-fire is the only means by which to properly dispose of an angel.

Holy water is the only means by which to completely destroy a demon.

A double-pronged approach, if you will.

It was in fact the very reason as to why London was enjoying such unseasonably warm weather. And would continue to enjoy such heightened temperatures even whence seeing out the habitually colder seasons such as Autumn and Winter.

It only seemed fair, given what was coming.

And with the arrival of one more member of the Contingency plan, things were about to get hotter than ever.

* * *

Meet Avaritia. He is the tenth of what had been once a fourteen strong team. He is the tenth to arrive in London and someone has been greatly anticipating his arrival.

It was not however his ascribed second half Caritas, as you might have otherwise suspected. They were days away still, coming from much further afield than perhaps all members of the group, with one obvious exception.

It was Luxuria who awaited him in the Arrival lounge at the London airport. Naturally, she was to be found in the somewhat novel position of being without the company of her virtuous half Castitas. A deliberate act, what's very nature reeked of the inherent underhandedness present within the exchange itself.

Avaritia presented as a tall, dark skinned gentleman with eyes of verdant green, what naturally drew people's attention in passing. Much like Humanitas, he never remained the too long in the one place, but roamed the globe like a university student between semesters. His reasons for doing so were not however out of altruistic intentions such as they were with his fellow nomadic Virtue, nor a purloined attempt to 'find himself' as the university student might otherwise claim whilst wearing out the soles of their Ugg's and disentangling their dreadlocks from a raspberry bush they were attempting to fleece for whatever cash in hand might sustain them from one Podunk, threadbare town to the next.

Avaritia's compulsions were never anything so pointlessly itinerant. He was driven by one thing, and one thing only: the inherent and inert desire of attainment.

Greed wanted a finger in every pie. Big and party-size, alike. Everything that was considered to be of some value, particularly in the eyes of others, was what he wished to sequester for himself. And value was not always measured in dollar signs alone. Some of the most valuable items he had acquired in his travels had been things what would have meant nothing to a Queen of Kingdoms, but their owners would have nonetheless fought to the death so as to protect.

Pictures of deceased relatives, old newspaper articles, birth certificates, wedding rings, finger paintings, pet rocks... So long as they meant the world to someone, the greater Avaritia's drive to attain it.

Once upon a very long time passed, he had actually spent some centuries living as what the humans would refer to as a dragon; accumulating and amassing items of wealth and desire and interring himself deep beneath their gilded weight. He slept a good long while in that self-styled satisfaction, waking only to roast the odd knight or two who might have wandered in on some near-sighted venture so as to prove his 'would-be' worth to whatever monarch might have been reigning at the time.

But the nature of greed is to tire quickly of that which it has attained and to seek out new means by which to meet its ravenous, insatiable hunger. It had caused him to lock figurative horns on some occasions with Superbia, who through his hard work had attained many wonderous, desirable things and was loathe to share but a wit of it.

Lust and Greed were Vices not to distinct from one another.

They had precious little distance from one another throughout history, in fact.

Not that their 'better halves' were the least aware of this.

They kept it secret; arranging their clandestine affairs at times in which Chastity and Charity were more the likely to be kept busy. They had ended up meeting in some extremely strange places as a result of this; jungles what had never before been touched by the hand of man, abandoned islands, little mountain villages off of the Northernmost peaks of isolated Peru, Cornwall, the list went on and on.

They were taking rather the risk now, but there was simply nothing for it.

The shared desire of attainment was too great. The draw to one another passionate and irascible.

Luxuria hardly felt it unreasonable. After all, needs as great as Lust were ironically never going to find satiation at the hands of her counterpart; a Virtue who had been instrumental in the creation of such things as the chastity belt, abstinence and the rumours which suggested that one who habitually interfered with oneself was likely to wind up either without eyesight or with a localized body hair problem relegated specifically to the region of the palm.

Luxuria and Avaritia did not make it far, in fact. Their physical union resulted in the steaming up of mirrors in the women's toilet block. Their affiliate output of pheromones was potent enough to result in so many humans within the airport to engage with either one another (or themselves) in such a flagrant and unabashed show of passion, that police might in fact have been called if any of the security team had been in any state (and possessed of a currently unoccupied hand) to do so.

"Such a shame," Avaritia was remarking, standing with the bare of his thighs pressed into the side of the sink upon which Luxuria was reclining. The underside of her own legs were still pressed up against the wall of his chest, one foot, resolutely clinging to the high heel which adorned it, dangling beside his right ear. "Of all the sequences, it has been the one I have enjoyed the most. I was certain the Almighty was pleased..."

"Not a matter of being pleased. This was always on the cards." Luxuria dropped her legs down, so that she could sit up straight. She took the paper towels on which her decadent floof of hair had been resting and used them to delicately mop sweat from about her neck. "She planned to let the world do it's thing for six thousand years, collate the results and then _boom_. Reel it all in, moosh it all up and start again." She shrugged. "Beta testing. Nothing more, nothing less."

"A strange thing." Avaritia said, stepping back so as to free himself from the receptacle of Luxuria's body. He wiped himself clean with a hand towel, zipped himself back into his trousers and refastened his belt. "I thought this world was her alpha project. Her _piece de resistance_ , if you will."

"All I know is what we need to do and I see little point in debating the systematics of it." Luxuria snapped her fingers towards where her shoe and her underwear had been unceremoniously tossed. There was of course no way that she was about to go wriggling her knickers back on, given what they had likely been in contact with, but she was not about to get about with just the one shoe.

"I was thinking, though," She said, as Avaritia obediently crossed the room, picked up her stiletto and returned so as to slide it back upon her delicate left foot. "Since meeting here in London, I've noticed my powers seem to be operating at a rate unprecedented. Even whence compared to those smaller contracts God hired us out for." She gave Avaritia an excited and knowing look. "Why don't we make the most of it? Give these poor witless bastards a good time before they exit stage left? One crazy night of greed and lust."

It was true that when their influence came together, the results were incomparable. Greed and Lust were so much alike, after all. And the effects that their combined presence had on the world around them, were a visceral marvel beyond compare. Unless one were of course to hold them up against the likes of Caligula's court in its heyday, the Marquis de Sade and the Hellfire club.

It was not just Luxuria and Avaritia who benefited from the coagulation of their otherworldly influence, but humanity itself. And humanity never had itself a much better, nor a raunchier time, then when it was steeped in the exquisite pheromones of near insatiable lust and covetous greed.

A heatwave had swept through London, the likes of which had never before been seen. And things were about to get a Hell of a lot hotter.

* * *

_~ **Saturday - 27th of April, 3:45pm~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London SoHo...** _

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Or so the saying goes.

Crowley was a demon who had once whole heartedly agreed with this assessment. Oh sure, there had been times in the past when he had enjoyed the work which Hell had delegated him. Especially that work which would result in the stirring of tempers, frustrations and general disconcertments alike.

Crowley rather liked seeing people get a good head of steam up. Dolling out little things which culminated in reddening faces, stamping feet and distended temporal arteries was very much up his alley. Things like... wearing very tall, very inconsiderate hats to the movie theatre, sitting in front of someone much shorter than you and irritating said soul to such a degree that they sped home in an itinerant rage, flipped their car in an attempt to avoid side-swiping a badger and having to then explain the whole thing to their pregnant wife, who invariably and rather expectantly, took to them with the business end of a steel spatula.

This was the sort of work where Crowley got his jollies. Mischievous mishaps, with somewhat the more universally explosive and more often that not hysterical outcomes. (Hysterical, so long as gallows humour was your considered to be your particular cup of arsenic).

There was other work, of course. Work of such a dark, despicable and maligned a nature that it left a rather sour taste in the mouth of a demon quite as sensitive as Crowley understood himself to be.

He had never fancied this sort of work. Had avoided it, where possible. Used his silver, serpentine tongue to convince his superiors that it was labour far the suited to other more experienced, more _deserving_ demons than the likes of eternally modest little old him.

Perhaps it had been cowardly of him. But Crowley never had much of a stomach when it came to the wending of the truly wicked. As he so often said; he was a demon who did not fall so much as saunter vaguely downwards. And he hadn't won that accolade as being 'Hell's most approachable demon' by being anything less then even tempered and relatable. There weren't many humans who would go out of their way to sit down to a glass of wine with a blithering sociopath, and Crowley rather enjoyed good conversation. He would have missed out on a lot of interesting things in his six thousand years if he had insisted on being an odious little shithead.

Crowley could not in fact imagine any other demon being capable of shelving their natural instincts and taking up employment in a human nursing home. No, he was certainly unique in this regard. Hastur would have burned the place to the ground by now. Beelzebub probably would have eaten one of the residents the moment they uttered something considered to be _'inzolant'_. Never the mind what Ligur would have done; if he hadn't been otherwise preoccupied with being a dark stain on Crowley's study room floor.

Rita was a much preferred boss to Lord Beelzebub, Crowley had long since decided. She had no reservations when it came to offering praise and feedback, where she felt it had been rightly earned. She thought Crowley was a 'good little worker' and had been especially impressed by how he had conducted himself at Gretchen's funeral. He had handled himself, she said, with the utmost of respect and decorum and a degree of maturity she had not supposed him to be in possession of upon their first initial meeting.

Crowley had been extremely touched by the appraisal, as it was not the sort of thing he was at all accustomed to hearing. Sure, back in the days that he had worked for Hell, he might receive a commendation for a job well done (or badly done, rather) but this was so far as things went where feedback was concerned. And, let's be honest, most of those jobs had been the brainchild of vastly more wicked and imaginative creatures than he: human beings. Those things of which he had actually worked hard at, and put genuine, concentrated effort into the planning and exacting off, were just taken for granted. A thing what was considered to be an expectation of his being a demon and simply doing what a demon _ought_ to be doing.

Crowley had been so pleased, in fact, that he had gone out and purchased Rita a 'World's best Boss' coffee cup, which he had presented to her at the start of one of his shifts earlier in the week. It had been a little tongue in cheek and she had sort of rolled her eyes at the gifting of it, but every day following, Crowley had seen her take her morning and afternoon cup of tea in it and had even caught her once turning it about in her hand with a fond smile lightening the otherwise usually serious lines of her face.

Everyone needed a little thoughtfulness at times, the demon was discovering. And few among them were immune to the utterly destabilizing nature of praise.

It was nice to be thought well of. It was nice to reach the end of the day and actually feel as though he had made some genuine contributions. To feel his human muscles a little sore and achy and his mind made weary through the varied exertions the day had presented him with.

It was nice to hear someone say 'good job' and for him not to feel the instinctual need to hiss at them for bandying out the dreaded 'G' word.

Even nicer to think that his charitable efforts would have been making all his once pestilential ex-employers sick to their diabolical little stomachs. The gravy to top what he already considered to be a far the more enjoyable existence than any of the thousands of years preceding it could lay claim to.

As such, Crowley arrived at Aziraphale's bookstore that day in positive spirits. It had been a good days work, but the day had been much hotter than even an old serpent like him would prefer and he felt a bit sticky and sweaty in his papery work clothes. Nothing a cool shower and a nap wouldn't fix.

Though it hardly made the evening ahead any the more palatable.

Crowley had some clothes draped over his arm, price tags still attached and a pair of boots pinched between his fingers. He was trying not to make use of magic for menial matters these days and so had taken to shopping with almost Kardashian like levels of enthusiasm and success.

Why he had ever bothered with magicking his clothes into place all these years, he didn't know. The abject thrill of 'attainment' was almost addictive and though barely any of the money in his account had come about from veritable means, it still made him feel strangely accomplished to leave a store with items that he had actually purchased. Which humans themselves had created, which were things of genuine weight and density and worth.

Things which would exist when he had taken them off; things which would be required to be washed, cleaned, folded away, hung up. Things which took up space, like the souvenirs he had taken to collecting throughout the years of his long life.

Crowley was starting to like attainment very much. And the attainment of which he was most proud, of which he coveted most gleefully, was currently installed behind the register of his dusty little bookshop, reading glasses slouched partway down his ski slope nose and trailing a pen through a series of painstakingly measured columns, packed with words, numbers and scribblings what would only make sense to the orthodox mind of one such as the angel Aziraphale.

"I wonder if you might help me, good sir," Crowley said, putting on his very best 'upper class' posh-bastard accent as he plucked a random book up from a teetering display table. "I'm in the market for a copy of the _Kama Sutra - Advanced Practitioners Level._ Was wondering if you might have any in stock?"

Once upon a time, Aziraphale might have effaced shock or lesser annoyance with Crowley for such a provocative tease. But Crowley wasn't the only one colouring outside the lines these days and Aziraphale did not in fact so much as flinch at the demon's words but glanced up with a simple smile before returning his eyes with deliberate purpose to the page in front of him.

"As luck would have it, I am currently in possession of four. Two _Complete Illustrated Kama Sutra_ edited by Lance Dane, an 1883 translation by Richard Burton and some hand written copies of the original manuscript by _Vatsyayana,_ whom I once shared a surprisingly boring conversation with in 3CE regarding the courtship of goats in the Garo Hills."

It was not the answer Crowley had at all been expecting and he spent a few moments allowing himself to be surprised by it.

"What, you actually have copies of the _Kama sutra?"_ He glanced about the interior of the cosy old store with obvious scepticism."...Here?"

Aziraphale shrugged. "It's a book, is it not?" He gestured about the interior of the shop. "Clearly, I _have_ books."

"Uh-huh." Crowley mused, attempting to maintain an air of quiet nonchalance, whilst squinting purposefully behind the lenses of his glasses at the contents lining each of the bookshelves nearest him. "Any, uh... idea where I might find these particular... books?"

Aziraphale chuckled softly as he marked his place in the ledger and circled out from behind the counter so as to join Crowley in the centre of the room.

"You're welcome to try your luck but I don't envy your chances." His green eyes continued to dance with traces of thinly restrained mischief, being all too aware of how intentionally impossible his bookshop was to navigate. "Besides, I can't imagine how much of the original _Kama Sutra_ you would find particularly useful. How you might keep a wife? How to identify the types of women you should or should not have sex with?"

"Well, that's easy. None of them." Crowley said, wrinkling his face at the thought. Oh sure, he liked women well enough (he did in fact like them a great deal more than he liked human males) but having been one himself at particular junctures of the past had convinced him beyond a sliver of a doubt that he did not relish the challenge of attempting to please one sexually. There were just too many parts to tinker with and they took a great deal longer to wind up than a male body. Sometimes you could wind until dawn and be no better off for it.

It was a relief really, that Aziraphale had chosen to live in a male type body whilst on earth. Made matters a Heaven of a lot easier. If he had chosen to be female, well, Crowley would have still found a way to get his head around it. That was what love was all about after all, and it was Aziraphale's spirit what Crowley was in love with.

In all the thousands of years he had been on earth however, it was only natural that he had grown to love the body as well. That was simply a normal by-product of identification; the visual and physical construct what was wrapped around the soul. Crowley could hardly imagine Aziraphale outside the context of his perfectly straight white teeth, his gentle eyes with their almost ridiculously long doe like lashes, his soft, pudgy belly and deceptively strong, broad shoulders. The shock of fluffy white hair, fussy little tartan bowties and periwinkle blue shirts. (Crowley had not even known such a colour as periwinkle _existed_ until Aziraphale had explained it to him one day. He still considered it to be a source of information what he could very well have lived without, but there you go).

"Besides... I'm pretty sure there are other things in the _Kama Sutra_ that are... translatable." Crowley said, doing his very best to smile seductively but rather the more resembling how a baby looks when it has gastric reflux. Aziraphale pushed his glasses up a little closer to his eyes, giving Crowley a scolding sort of look in return.

"Yes. If only you had bothered to pick up a copy when it first came out. You might have found that whole chapter on 'How to seduce an angel when you are a demon on layover from Hell' to have been particularly useful."

Crowley made a big show of slapping down the book he had been holding on the tabletop beside him. "Darn the luck!" He exclaimed and with such histrionic malaise that it made Aziraphale laugh to hear it. "To think of all the centuries I might have shaved off if only I had bothered to learn how to read!"

"Well they don't say knowledge is power for no reason." Aziraphale said, holding up a hand as Crowley started edging his head down with the obvious intention of giving him a kiss. "I um..." He made a flicking motion with his head, indicating somewhere over his right shoulder. "I have a customer."

Crowley's brow quirked in that perpetually curious manner it had maintained since the moment he had slithered on up into the world. He couldn't see the customer himself and supposed they must have likely buried themselves in any one of Aziraphale's haphazardly collated piles of books, much like a mountaineer finding themselves snowed under whilst attempting to tackle Mt Everest. With likely equal part chances of survival.

"Yeah ...so? What, you're worried our kissing might make them uncomfortable and drive them out of the shop?" He said with a sardonic smile. He knew full well that anything what hastened a potential customer out the front door, was always worthy of consideration in Aziraphale's mind.

This was the angel, after all, what had once gone about and collected up mouse and rat droppings in a dustpan and then systematically scattered them about the interior of his shop, during a very odd season in the early 1900's, when everyone appeared to have developed some latent interest in old books and, more to the point, the stores which sold them.

Aziraphale was, in fact, giving Crowley's words some serious thought. "... Good point." He said at last and, having cupped a hand firmly to the back of the demon's neck, pulled him down into what onlookers might have described as an 'unnecessarily passionate kiss'.

Crowley, for his part, never judged any manner of kiss he shared with Aziraphale as 'unnecessary'. And though a small part of him was irked by the duplicity of the act, it was effectively drowned out, as it always was, by his much louder feelings of genuine bliss and relief.

It had been little less than a month in which they had started to incorporate a physical element into their once considered to be 'fraternal' relationship. It hadn't yet progressed far beyond the point of kissing and touching, but this was mainly as a result of Aziraphale's angelic biological restrictions, rather than inherent lack of desire from each party.

The road travelled to reach even this modest plateau had been fraught with bumps and obstacles along the way. Crowley would never take so much as a kiss for granted, knowing the difficulties they had each faced as individuals to get quite as far as they had.

And kisses like this were especially enjoyable. The strength in Aziraphale's hand as it clutched to the back of his neck; the way that he had tugged Crowley down so as to lay claim to his lips...

There was desire there. A want to possess. Crowley could not help but to imagine how those hands would feel if cupped to other parts of his body. Hands what could so gently cradle an aged book, belied a quiet, unassuming strength. A strength what was in the same breath sensuous and carnal and profoundly, exquisitely erotic.

Crowley ached to feel that touch to each side of his hips, curled about his waist, up behind his shoulders even. Held, cradled, even jerked and yanked hither and thither under sway of a heated moment. A hand inching up the back of his neck, like a spider traipsing its own wayward, spidery path and fingers burying deep into the locks of his hair, tugging backwards so that hard that his scalp _hurt_...

Crowley was rather wishing the customer would get the hint and get on their bike. They had since drifted into view, though Crowley was none the wiser for it; far the more preoccupied with melting into gooey nothingness on the floor, barely maintaining a grip on his clothes and shoes, using his remaining arm to hang off of Aziraphale's shoulders like an amorous limpet.

Aziraphale was watching however, peering out from the corners of his eyes as the young woman rounded the corner of the bookshelf, thumbing through the pages of a tome she had since stumbled upon. As opposed to the typically bashful English reaction Aziraphale had been banking on (that of stilted throat clearing, awkwardly divergent eye contact and hastened self-eviction from whichever situation had brought about any and all of the aforementioned) the woman simply smiled in an offputtingly tolerant manner before returning, seemingly unfazed, to her browsing.

Aziraphale broke the kiss with a sigh, leaving Crowley puckering at the air like a fish out of water. "No joy, I'm afraid. Humans are much too accommodating these days, don't you think?"

Crowley rolled his eyes. "Yeah. I grieve for the times when such a display called for nothing less than a swift and proper stoning, followed up with a soul cleansing pear of anguish and a good old fashioned go around on the rack." He followed Aziraphale back towards the counter, draping his clothes over the edge and setting the shoes down so that he could give his arms a stretch. "You know that when we kiss you make the same sounds as when you're eating dessert?" He said, loathe as ever to tread water too long in the one conversation topic. _"Mmm-mmm-mmm-MMmm-mum-mum-mum."_

"I don't go _mum-mum-mum,"_ Aziraphale said with a tired sigh, picking up where he had left off in his ledger. Paused a moment, casting his mind back to a few moments earlier and acknowledging that the demon had not, ironically enough, spoken false." The first part may be correct. And you should take it as a compliment."

"I do. Just thought it worth stirrin' you about."

"How was work today?" Aziraphale asked and smiled to himself, finding it a strangely wonderful thing to be asking a person who had habitually avoided gainful human employment for the better part of sixty centuries how their day at work had been. It often seemed that he and Crowley were far the more routine and collectively boring than most actual human beings and just how wonderfully perfect their arrangement was for it.

"It was good." Crowley said, turning and sliding his backside up onto the tabletop and easing down so that he was lazing right on top of the open ledger. He stared up at Aziraphale's unimpressed expression, eyes mockingly innocent from behind the dark lenses of his glasses. "Got some interesting news about those supposed relatives of Gretchen's."

"Oh?" Aziraphale seemed to be acting far too nonchalant, given the circumstances. He of course knew how upset Crowley had been, having caught wind of his favoured charges distant relatives snuffling about for residual funds like a pair of truffle hunting hogs. This was the sort of conversation he might normally have paid close attention to; taken his glasses off, looked Crowley dead square in the eyes, bunkered his brows in out of genuine concern.

He was doing none of this. He was actually going so far as to _avoid_ eye contact; examining something in a book he had only just opened with a magnifying glass he had retrieved from the top drawer of the cabinet. It was all very peculiar and out of character. The book had not even been marked in any meaningful way that Crowley had been able to observe; though this was of course Aziraphale, who had likely memorized near every page of every book he had ever read.

Still... he was being very awkward and this was always a sure fire sign that Aziraphale knew a great deal more than he was otherwise pretending to know.

"Rita called me into the office this morning. She wanted to let me know not to worry about them. Said they're heading back to France and have expressed absolutely no interest in following up on Gretchen's estate." Crowley lowered his glasses slightly, gauging Aziraphale's reaction. The angel had paused a moment, eyes locked somewhere to the middle distance. "Apparently, a will turned up. Gretchen's remaining funds will be donated to _Action for Children._ Apparently they work with disadvantaged families and their kids to help give them a better life."

"What wonderful news!" Aziraphale exclaimed, setting his magnifying glass down and placing his hand now to the side of Crowley's face. "Oh, that must be such a relief to you, my dear. I know that you were terribly worried about it." He set a kiss to the demon's forehead, right atop the unconvinced wrinkle what had formed between his brows. "It would seem Gretchen had planned ahead after all. And, well, it makes absolute sense does it not? You did mention once that she worked performing those... surgeries. Perhaps this was a means by which to assuage whatever feelings she may have been nursing concerns it?"

He was babbling; stumbling over his words such as he did when he was nervous. Perhaps the obtuse angels of Heaven might not have cared enough to have ever gotten to know Aziraphale properly, but Crowley did and he knew full well what all this anxious fluttering amounted to.

"What did you do?" He asked, linking his finger into the pocket of Aziraphale's cardigan, as the angel made to bumble off to god only knows where.

Aziraphale might have once given himself over to bashfulness, but he was rather a changed creature these days. He instead made a show of affecting offense for the demon's blunt question.

"The very insinuation! I'm an _angel._ " He pulled a rather coy expression that Crowley wasn't accustomed to seeing. He didn't at all mind it. "What on earth would you suppose me to have done?"

Crowley gave him that look. That one which said 'we have known each other for over six thousand years and you can no sooner fool me now then you could in the times before we took to sharing beds and baths and body fluids.' And Aziraphale knew it to be every bit as true. He might have enjoyed somewhat menial success in fooling his once celestial superiors, but then they had never cared enough to properly attune themselves to his particular ins and outs and various foibles of character.

"Well... nothing that I have not needed to resort to when certain... suited gentleman turn up attempting to both extradite and liquidate my assets out from underneath me." And he gave then such an ostensibly smug and indulgently cheeky smile that it sent Crowley's heart to fluttering in his muscle void little chest. "Needs must when the devil drives and all."

So it had been just as Crowley had suspected. He knew it unlikely that a will for Gretchen had just suddenly been unearthed after so much vigorous searching. She herself had informed him that she had never made such arrangements. And it was Aziraphale alone whom had borne exclusive witness to Crowley's disquiet concerning the sudden opportunistic appearance of his cherished clients distant relatives. More to the point, he was the only one who had the 'means' by which to remedy the situation. In his own words, by the 'snapping of fingers'.

"How you expect me to keep my hands off of you when you go and do something so diabolical and then follow it up with a statement like that..." He murmured, reaching up with a smile and fisting his hand about Aziraphale's tidy little tartan bow tie. He pulled him down, raised his head and gave the angel a kiss what was laden with strides more meaning than that of which they had earlier partaken. "I don't even want to know how you pulled it off. The fact that you did it at all..." He smirked, brushing his nose against the upturned tip of Aziraphale's. "Seems I'm not the only one drifting over the centre line."

"Don't you realize by now, my dear?" Aziraphale's lips permeated a soft bow as he cupped his hand to the side of Crowley's face, tracing his thumb along the indenture of his temple. "I would drift to any far corner of the world for you."

It was the sort of moment where if it were a movie a romantic crescendo might swell and the camera might zero in on the lovers eyes as they softly looked to one another with vulnerability and just the ever so slightest and decorously subtle _soupçon_ of desire.

This was, of course nothing of the sort and so they shared the moment, smiled meaningfully in the understanding of the everything that it was and then moved on with the continued banalities what was expected of a balmy Saturday afternoon.

"Surprised you didn't change before coming home," Aziraphale was heard to be remarking, having since forcibly leveraged Crowley's head off of his ledger and giving a backhanded swat to his bottom so as to send him on his way. Crowley, as to be expected, started projecting that smack into some mental fantasies what were as typically detailed as one with an imagination as broad and as diverse as this particular demon's was.

It was the weather which was mostly to blame. Got you to thinking all sorts of things, the heat. Way it got under your skin, into your body. Made you want to buck your clothes, give your flesh a good reason for all the sweating it was doing.

Crowley wondered what it felt like; running your hand over someone's else's slippery skin... _Aziraphale's_ slippery skin, to be precise.

He could see it in his head. The two of them, there in the bookshop. No customer in sight. No other people on the street, in fact. All the better so as to be able to keep the shutters in the windows open. Let the warm rays of the sun shine right on in, lance itself to the plains of their naked flesh, as they lay there, tangled around each other, slippery and pliable with lips and tongues touching and tasting, hands clasping, legs twining, the everything else that was going on in-between...

Yep. Definitely something to be said for the heat.

Six thousand years of only getting it from yourself didn't much help matters, either.

"Didn't get spit up on as much today." Crowley said, returning his ever the more distracted mind to the conversation he was supposed to be having. "Minor 'miracle' in and of itself. I'll still pop it in for a spin, if that's all right with you."

"Of course." Aziraphale looked to Crowley with some concern as the demon picked up his clothes and shoes and gave them a little dust off with his hand. "Are you... settling back in okay? Now that your Gretchen is no longer there?"

"It's a different routine. Not going to lie, still miss the old duck. Got a couple of new residents moving in however, so that's been keeping me busy." He took note of how Aziraphale's expression had now shifted to one of fondness. "What are you smirking at?"

"Oh, nothing." The angel said. And then, because he understood full well that 'nothing' was every bit an objectionable answer, decided instead to be upfront with what he was thinking. Such things were... okay now, after all. "I just... I still find that you look ever so smart in your work uniform."

 _Ah,_ Crowley thought. _Seems like I'm not the only one who the heat is getting to._

He was getting better now at recognizing when Aziraphale was being a little self-indulgent and, dare he say, flirty. He still had that sort of 'must control myself' sidelong look, interspersed by short, fleeting glances which suggested he was having a much more difficult time of controlling himself than otherwise intended.

Crowley liked that. But then again, he was a demon. Demon's could not help but take pleasure in seeing others indulge themselves. Especially those things they might supposed to have been deserving of shame. Too much food, too much drink, too much appreciation of how a certain demon looked in a particular article of clothing.

"Hmm. If I'm not mistaken, it sounds like 'someone' wants this uniform to feature in a little fantasy role-play." Crowley paused for a moment, thinking this over and then added, with a slight nuance of concern: "I'm... assuming the likes of which involve me taking your blood pressure and temperature and treating you for _'_ erotomania', not the one where I'm doing what I _actually_ do at my job, which is... spoon feeding, wiping arses and sponge bathing. Only one of which is actually sexy, mind. ... At least... with you in mind, not so far as my clients are concerned. That would be the uh, the sponge bathing of course, not the arse wiping-"

Aziraphale raised a hand, cutting him off much further into the pass than he would have otherwise preferred. "I um... I get it, thank you. And I wasn't making any sort of suggestions of the sort. I simply think you look very smart and handsome."

"Well, if you think this looks good, you should see what I'm wearing later." Crowley gestured proudly at the clothing items draped over his arms; still spouting their considerably boastful price tags and the pair of Italian shoes what hadn't yet come into contact with the ground.

"All black still, I notice." Aziraphale observed, raising a curt brow. "Even in this weather. How... considerate."

"That's me. Mr Consideration, I am." Crowley yawned, just wide enough to show off every flawless molar in the rear of his mouth. "Thought I might try and squeeze a nap in before we head out tonight. Lot of long shifts lately, few sleepovers. You mind?"

"Not at all." Aziraphale gestured with a smile towards the back rooms. "Go take yourself a nice cool shower, throw your uniform in the washing machine and have a rest. I'll wake you with plenty of time to get ready."

"Thanks." Crowley leant over to plant a kiss to Aziraphale's cheek; a gesture which seemed so natural that they might in fact have been doing it for so many a thousand years prior. "Love you."

"Love you too." Aziraphale said, smiling as he watched Crowley swish his way towards the rear of the store. Was it his imagination, or was the demon canter levering his hips a great deal more than usual? The coquettish look that Crowley now flashed over his shoulder, more the likely so as to make certain he had Aziraphale's attention, voided any of the doubts the angel had been nursing.

Wily serpent knew full well what he was doing. He was flirting. Aziraphale had long since made Crowley aware of his attraction to his physique; his bottom in particular, and Crowley had wasted no time in playing up to it.

One little thing he had taken to doing, Aziraphale had observed, was to edge up the tail of his jacket when standing in front of Aziraphale, so as to draw attention to his backside. A far less subtle approach came once in the form of Crowley 'accidentally' dropping a pen by Aziraphale's study desk and taking rather the unnecessarily protracted length of time in which to pick it up. Executed by means of bending floridly at the waist, as though forgetting he had anything in the way of lower leg joints whatsoever.

The worst part was, that even in spite of knowing what he was up to, Aziraphale had enjoyed it all the same. Something which made him feel rather the more human and typically male than he had ever done before.

It must have been the weather. The weather what inspired Crowley to slink about like a cat in heat. To tease and to flirt and to all but coil himself around Aziraphale on a daily basis. To give little tugs to his clothing, laden with meaning, to press little kisses to the sides of his neck when he was otherwise occupied with work duties.

To lay there in bed when they were supposed to have been watching a movie, hyper focused instead on Aziraphale's hand; stroking and caressing between each of the fingers, chancing hopeful glances up at his face. Pursing his lips to form that pout which Aziraphale might once have described as petulant but found in more recent times to be rather seductive.

To say nothing of the times in which he eschewed subtly completely and simply slung his legs over Aziraphale as though he were nothing less than a prize stallion which he intended to ride until its back broke through.

 _Were demons capable of being in heat?_ Aziraphale wondered, forcing a practiced smile onto his face as the customer finally trailed their way up to the counter with the book they had been earlier examining. They themselves smiled a little knowingly as he completed the unwanted transaction and slipped the tome into a brown paper carry bag. _He did say once that his urges tend to wax and wane with the planetary retrogrades... Mars, I think? Maybe something like that is happening now?_

Once the customer had departed, Aziraphale did in fact switch on his cheap, slow, plasticky computer and log onto the world wide net to check. It took him about fifteen minutes so as to load each of the pages he wished to check, but that left plenty of time so as to boil the kettle and make himself a cup of tea.

He discovered that it was not Mars what was apparently in retrograde during the month of April and May but that of Jupiter, Pluto and Saturn. The site he was looking at mentioned some horoscope-esque divinations, suggesting that with these planets in retrograde it was a good time to be considering things such as changes and transformation (where Pluto was concerned) reviewing belief systems and ideals (for Jupiter) and, most interestingly and seemingly relevant, examining long-term goals, responsibilities and renewing commitments (Saturn).

When examining the supposed affects caused by the planet Mars in retrograde, it did suggest that a person's sexual drive was more the likely to _wane_ during that time, as opposed to heightening it. Then again, Crowley was a demon and opposition fairly much comprised the nature of his being.

Aziraphale switched the computer off with a shrug. Perhaps Crowley was simply feeling a little randy and there was no deeper meaning behind it. There were enough studies which suggested that the sexual drive naturally increased when a person started readily indulging their libido. Now that they were more physically engaged with one another than ever before, perhaps it had awakened something in Crowley what had been existing in a state of otherwise quiet remission throughout the long years of their acquaintance.

It was certainly doing that and more for Aziraphale.

A shame about those celestial barbs digging into his brain every five minutes. There was a lot more what could have been done for addressing those urges if not for that begrudged mental chastity belt clinching about his spirit with every potentially frisky foray he might have otherwise engaged.

Having no immediate solution to his persisting conundrum, Aziraphale returned, with a soft sigh, to his end of day tasks.

**~X~**

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, that's the first update out of the road. Taking a break now to get the dog out for a walk and prepare some lunch, and then I'm back into it. Only six more to go today, hooray! :D


	40. Or, in which we ask whether the pink ones really taste any different?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wanted a life. He wanted a life free from Heaven, a life with Crowley in which they could partake and savour of the very things what would be considered a standard element of the corporeal experience.
> 
> He wanted a life in which he could take the person he loved into his arms, kiss them and feel nothing but the pleasure of being close and cherished and tickled pink. Not a life where such things coincided with vicious strokes of pain; punitive measures of an institution he had no desire to remain connected to.
> 
> He wanted it severed. He wanted it gone. Every bit as much as he wished to be rid of the confounded gold ring, what was a constant reminder that a part of him would always be wed to the hateful place...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, the puppers is walked, lunch has been served and hair is currently coated in dye. Multi-tasking for the win! Time to get some editing done while my hair changes colour! *Rolls up sleeves* LET'S GET READY TO EDIT!

**~X~**

* * *

**_~Saturday - 27th of April, 4:17pm~_ **   
**_Opposite A.Z Fell & Co's - London Soho..._ **

At roughly the same time, in a Chinese restaurant what enjoyed comparatively useful street side views, Uriel, Dagon and a Disposable demon were keeping watch over the bookshop. Uriel had a glass of water, which she hadn't yet touched and Dagon's chopsticks were currently scraping up the last remaining vegetables of the Szechuan chicken she had long since devoured.

The Disposable (whose name was Eric but no one had ever thought to ask) was powering his way through his third bag of prawn crackers and simply looking the pleased for being included in an outing what did not, for once, involve Hastur.

"For badness sake, just _eat_ something would you?" Dagon said, dropping her chopsticks onto her plate with a sigh. Uriel turned her attention from the window for the first time in the hour or so they'd been stationed there.

"Excuse me?"

"The point of spying is to look as though you are NOT in fact spying." Dagon explained, picking up two fortune cookies from the dish atop the table and passing one over to the Disposable. "You couldn't look more conspicuous if you tried. You're staring right at the shop, not eating anything and wearing a suit which screams 'I'm from the human government and possibly here to kidnap you!'" She shook her head, cracking open the fortune cookie and unravelling the tiny piece of paper inside. "Got a lot to learn about subterfuge, you do."

"Well forgive me if it's not exactly an angels aesthete." Uriel replied coolly, glancing back towards the shop. "Besides, you're a fine one to talk about being conspicuous. Since the moment we met up, it's just been one human male after another attempting to make conversation with you. It's very distracting."

"Hey, I'm just as confused as you are." Dagon admitted, taking a small handheld mirror out of her pocket and checking her appearance for what felt like the hundredth time that hour. She couldn't understand for the life of her what she had done to illicit so much unwanted attention. Her disguise was that of what she supposed to be an average human woman in the prime of her life.

She had covered the luminescent scales what usually dwelt upon her cheeks with rosy looking skin, capped and whitened her teeth and let her hair down; adopting a full bodied, wavy style what seemed popular amongst human females. (At least, according to some of the magazines she had perused as part of her research). The weather was warm and Dagon had observed that most humans tended to wear very little under these conditions. She herself was mimicking a young woman she had observed from the alleyway into which she had ascended; who had been dothed in a white spaghetti strap top, high waisted skinny jeans with rips in the thighs and shoes which had a considerable heel on them what rendered most useful human calves into gnarled knots what wouldn't have looked out of place if found upon the roots of a tree. The heels were irritating but seemed apropos for the situation.

Dagon certainly felt as though she was blending in far the more fluently than the Disposable; who was dressed in a threadbare attire and hat what were reminiscent of an extra from Oliver Twist. Not that Dagon knew anything about Oliver Twist but a quick observation of current human fashion trends was enough to inform her that the Disposables attire was completely inappropriate for the time period.

Still, he in the least, was being left alone. If one more human male insisted on hovering by her elbow like an amorous fly trying its luck on a particularly alluring piece of dog shit, there would be no force in Heaven or Hell what would prevent her from pulling a Crowley and lodging her heel firmly into some very specific human male parts.

Dagon tittered as she read aloud the fortune as espoused upon her by the cookie. " _Hard words break no bones, fine words butter no parsnips_." She dropped the piece of paper onto her now empty plate with a derisive sniff. "What does that even mean? Humans are so odd."

"I'd think a spoon'd be the best means of buttering a parsnip." The Disposable contributed thoughtfully, emulating how someone might in fact shovel some butter onto a hot, baked vegetable.

"They're also the best things for scooping out eyeballs." Dagon added thoughtfully, earning a look of blatant disgust from Uriel in return. "What does yours say?"

The Disposable unravelled the over starched slip of paper and examined the words what had been typed, in Ariel font nonetheless, onto its surface.

 _"Now is the time to go ahead and pursue that love interest."_ He stared down at the fortune in obvious confusion, turning it over in his hand as though expecting something to have been written on the back.

"Do you 'have' a love interest?" Dagon asked taking another sip from her beer.

"Not that I know of..." The Disposable brightened. "Maybe I will. If this is anything to go by."

"It's not." Dagon said, shooting hope down out of the air as though it were a World War one fighter jet and tossed the third fortune cookie onto Uriel's plate. "Go on. Take a look at yours."

"No, thank you." Uriel replied, eyes glued so astutely to the shop across the street that it was a wonder she was able to tear them away without ripping her cornea's into pieces.

"Come _on,_ we've got time to kill! And only that, sadly. But you make do with what you got." She gestured towards the cookie with the open neck of her beer bottle. "Just humour us. Ain't much laughing gets done down in Hell, you catch my drift."

Uriel sighed, reaching down to pick up the brittle little biscuit and snapping it in half. What harm would it do to humour them?

She frowned at the piece of paper what revealed itself in the gallows of the fortune cookies belly. It was not the same white starched material as those on which Dagon and the Disposable's fortunes were written, but appeared to be composed of much older parchment. The edges looked burned, as though the paper had been fetched out of a fire.

"So? What's it say?" Dagon persisted, apparently having observed nothing at all odd with what Uriel had discovered. The angel, wondering if this was perhaps just one of those earthly things of which she was unfamiliar, unravelled the slip of paper and read aloud the calligraphic font what was ascribed to its surface:

 _"A Grate lacu shalt tern to its syde, such as a coyn whence set upon its edge. So too, shall it spyn and all what passeth through, shalt be mesured."_ She frowned and did much as the Disposable had done, turning the slip of paper about to see whether there was in fact something that she was missing. "I thought these things were supposed to be more generic than this."

"Does seem a bit of an odd one." Dagon admitted, tapping one of the blackened edges with her finger. "Might be worth holding onto. You never know."

Uriel was just in the midst of slipping the piece of paper into the breast pocket of her blazer when she caught sight of movement across the street. She sat up, ramrod straight, in her seat.

"Oh no."

"Oh no, what?" Dagon asked, taking another sip from her drink and doing her absolute utmost to ignore the interested look of the man sitting at the table adjacent to them. The fact that he was perched up with another, progressively more annoyed by the moment looking female, did not at all appear to be a deterrent to his attentions.

"Oh no, as in, 'oh no one of the Virtues just walked into the bookshop'." Uriel chanced another look and relaxed perhaps a quarter of an inch to see the door easing shut at the Virtues back. "I don't think he noticed us. Thank the Lord for small mercies."

Dagon took a look for herself. Not that there was anything to see by that stage. "Did you get a look at which one it was?"

"What does it matter?"

"A good deal. The only Virtue I could imagine being sent out to conduct a hit would be Industria. Otherwise they would send a Vice." Dagon crunched loudly on one half of her fortune cookie. The capped teeth felt a little strange. Been a long while since they hadn't been sharpened. "More'n likely the Virtue’s just feeling the angel out. Checking in to see whether or not he's going to cause trouble for them."

"Perhaps," Uriel acknowledged. It would make sense for the Contingency team to at least touch base with the expunged work operatives. If anyone were to pose a threat to another intended Apocalypse it was more the likely those who had already gone to exceptional strains to prevent the first. "Rather throws a crimp in our plans, however."

"Should we pull the plug?" The Disposable asked, feeling disappointed by the prospect. He was rather enjoying his little junket to earth. The food was good, there was room to move about without lodging your nose into a foul smelling armpit (or worse) and no one had attempted to pitch him into the jaws of some vicious hell beast for over a record hour or so.

It was nice as well, he found, being in close quarters to an angel. His visit to Heaven so many months back had been the same: that reticent sensation of everything suddenly feeling... smoother inside. As if all the jagged edges had been sanded down and a sickly weight leveraged from atop his fallen spirit.

It had been a long while since he had felt this way. THEY had felt this way. As a collective, the Disposable hive mind had never had it much better in Heaven. Your standard run of the mill Angels never did.

It had been peaceful, though. He missed the peace.

The 'not feeling under constant threat of exsanguination' was also a nice touch.

Dagon shook her head, flicking some hair back over her shoulder with irritation. Why human females felt the need to show any of this nonsense off she couldn't understand. Clearly, they were in no need of peripheral vision.

"I doubt once Crowley and the angel leave that the Virtue would care enough to stick around and spy. There would be no point. They don't know we're moving against them, after all."

"We're not moving against them." Uriel responded blandly. Even to her it sounded far too much like a practiced response.

Dagon chuckled, tossing another piece of fortune cookie into her mouth, where it was punitively rendered down to jagged shards.

"Just enjoy our company that much, do you?"

When the angel failed to reply; obviously troubled by the reality of the situation, Dagon reached over and cuffed a hand smartly against the side of her arm. It was clearly intended as a supportive gesture, because she wore a somewhat kindly look as she did it.

"Relax. Once they all shove off, we get in there, do what we need to do and get out." She said, easing back in her seat and washing down the cookie with another slug of beer. "Never fear. You'll be back in your precious Heaven before you know it."

Uriel still did not respond. Hers was a mind what was far too busy. Busy and troubled.

For yes, she would all too soon find herself perched back up in Heaven, that much was certain. Of what she was uncertain was whether there was any place, in all the known realms, where she might once again feel at peace.

There was nowhere beyond the reach of the Vices and the Virtues. Not Heaven, not Hell, nor the earth itself.

Not even God almighty.

**~X~**

* * *

**~Saturday - 27th of April, 4:15pm~**   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London SoHo...** _

Aziraphale removed what meagre 'profits' he had accumulated from the dusty old antique cash register and conveyed it to the safe at the rear of the store. He went about the bay windows, closing blinds and returning capsized books to the nooks from which they had been usurped.

After checking off an invoice against a newly received order, Aziraphale took pause just long enough to go and check in on Crowley. The demon had slunk out for a cigarette some fifteen minutes earlier and not nearly in as much a secretive manner as he had otherwise been hoping. Aziraphale found him, having since returned to the bedroom, suctioned to the wall in his underpants, having apparently found it much too hot to both wear his pyjama's, or to sleep in the bed.

Bizarre though the image was, Crowley was rather the practiced at sleeping at whatever gravity defying position he so chose and was snoozing away as every bit as content as he might have been if otherwise ensconced by the likes of decadent billowy blankets, pillows, silk sheets and the like.

Aziraphale smiled fondly at the sight, reaching out to pet his hand to the curve of the demon's bottom. The demon who then shifted in his sleep, murmured softly and shuffled, gecko like, about on the wall so that he was now positioned diagonally. Aziraphale chuckled softly, stepping back out into the shop proper and easing the bedroom door shut behind him.

He had taken to fanning himself with one of the books he did not prize so highly, for the heat of the day had hardly eased what with the coming of the night and he was thinking that he himself would be in need of a shower before they headed out and then there was movement at the front of the store and Aziraphale felt sudden coldness steal through the once heated plains of his skin.

He approached cautiously; all too prepared to bring the corner of the book down on the back of an unsuspecting neck if so required.

A man was there; a very tall man, in a mostly advanced (and more the likely, highly sensitive) stage of balding. He had his back to Aziraphale, but a rear glance was more than enough to tell the angel everything he needed to know about his mystery guest: he was tall, dressed as though having just returned from a tropical safari, carrying a book under one arm and occupying his shop at a time in which said shop was quite definitely not open for business.

"I'm afraid that the shop is closed for the day, sir." Aziraphale called, maintaining a still appropriate distance from his unannounced guest. Given recent circumstances, you could never quite tell.

The man 'hmmmed' in a thoughtful manner. "Well, that's rather odd, given that the sign in the door most certainly said that you were currently Open." He turned, revealing a face that Aziraphale was very familiar with and ought really to have been able to identify even whence gazing upon the back of it. "Happened to be in the area, thought you might fancy having this one back. Only been holding onto it the last thirty or so years."

Aziraphale set down the book, a small surge of relief and genuine pleasure driving out the apprehension he had been earlier nursing.

"Humanitas. How ever have you been?"

"Rather well, actually." The Virtue replied, a fond smile pushing up the corners of his moustache as he approached the angel and just about lifted him off of his feet in a gregarious embrace. "Just got back from an aid effort in Cambodia; all frightfully busy work of course but ever so rewarding."

He handed back the book; a First Edition of _The Taming of the Shrew._ Aziraphale did not bother with checking it over for damage; Humanitas had been a frequent purveyor of the bookstore since the moment it had opened its doors and he had an appreciation for literature what rivalled even Aziraphale's. He treated every borrowed tome as though it were nothing less reverential and deserving of respect than the Holy Grail itself.

He was, in fact, the only customer Aziraphale had, whom he experienced no lingering anxieties regards the lending of books, for he knew they would be in safe hands until the point of their return.

Though the Vices and Virtues had long since maintained a respectable distance from the respective earth bound agents of Heaven and Hell, it was only likely, given the extended length of time they had all spent aboard the same churning hunk of blue, that they would run into each other from time to time. Crowley and Superbia, for example, made it far too often of a habit to go tripping over one another's metaphorically extended ankles; resulting in any number of resented happenstances occurring on both sides of the celestial spectrum.

Aziraphale and Humanitas, on the other hand, enjoyed far the more congenial a relationship. The nature of their 'good work' often drew them together in mutual interest and their shared love of written language and all its variant forms throughout earths dissonant millennia, meant theirs was an acquaintance born of both aligned interest and common amusement.

They would appear, at least from an outsiders limited perspective, very similar. If not in outward appearance, than at the very least in presentation. Humanitas gave the undivided impression of being every bit as ostensibly English as a steaming pot of tea set besmirched a neatly divided scone on a dainty side table upon which a stained crocheted doily was draped like an old cat. He spoke in a somewhat brisk, clipped, yet entirely joyful manner and in spite of his height and girth, had a propensity to lean forwards as though easing onto the tips of his toes in anxious anticipation for whatever it was what might next have been occurring.

He and Aziraphale were, in these respects, every bit two dapper peas in a very British pod. And though neither of them were notably aware of it, their accents did indeed tend to thicken, broaden and exaggerate when conversing with one another; to the point where a career as a Royal Family Reporter would not have seemed at all to be a stretch of presumed fancy.

"Are you in town long?" Aziraphale queried, taking the book over to a shelf which had long since maintained an empty space and sliding it back hence where it belonged. The tomes to either side welcomed its return like an old friend; which was, perhaps, precisely what it was.

"Long enough to get some light reading in. Back on business, some contractual thing." Humanitas immediately took notice of the tension which ratcheted down Aziraphale's body, as though he had been struck in the small of the back with a wooden ruler. "Oh, why the look, dear fellow? Nothing to do with you, I assure you. Not directly anyway. Is there anything you can recommend?" He perused the shelves to either side of him, hands clamped to the small of his back and head bobbing as he went about his inspections like a water fowl searching for its next fishy morsel. "I'm on a sort of layover for a while, feel I'll need something to occupy my ever the more circumspect idle hours."

Aziraphale rather felt like saying out loud precisely the reasons as to why he had such 'a look' upon his face but understood that such reason's did not at all require airing. It was offensively obvious as to why he might nurse trepidations where a Virtue's 'contracts' were concerned. It may have been a long time since the Almighty had put her most trusted colleagues to work in the field but the Principality remembered the particulars all too clearly. And they were not what you might call 'family friendly' particulars.

"Well, I rather think you would have read just about near every book that I have, Humanitas." Aziraphale said, because there was little point in saying much else. It was where Humanitas could effect the poise of being English all too well; the maintenance of strict and stringent decorum come whatever extenuating circumstances might then be rudely flung upon his face. "And then some. I have newer ones of course, but I would hardly imagine they would hold up to your unimpeachable standards."

"Hmm." The old Virtue mused, glancing over the books what jutted from the shelves before him like a perfectly acceptable Irish smile. "An old favourite then. Something I haven't read in a while. I feel as though I need something uplifting, you know?"

"The manner of your business is an unhappy task, I take it?" Aziraphale asked, though plainly not nearly so differentially as he might have thought himself to have done. Humanitas gave him a look which said he had been in no way fooled by the angels flagrant lack of tact.

"My dear chap, you know how this works. I have ever so much time for you, but that time cannot be interspersed with talk of the 'shop'." Humanitas drifted further into the belly of the store, turning his head from side to side, easing his gaze about corners in a display what lacked quite as much subtlety as Aziraphale's earlier questioning. "Your little... friend not in today?"

Aziraphale, in the midst of pointedly flipping over the 'Closed' sign in his front door, near about yanked it from its precariously aged string. He tutted and dithered, such as he always did when he was nervous and was all too much aware of doing whilst he was nervous.

"My... my little friend?"

Humanitas emitted a sigh what was as close to impatient as a Virtue was capable. "Oh, you know _who._ Your little demon friend. Big yellow eyes. Red hair. Walks like his hips are out of joint." He swirled a hand about the circumference of his jaw. "Rather the nice face. Crowley, wasn't it?"

"Well..." Aziraphale stalled, still feeling very cautious about the whole thing. It was only natural, given the... well, everything that were his and Crowley's particular circumstances.

"We all had drinks together New Years 1987, you remember?" Humanitas persisted, peering through narrowed eyes at the jittery angel as though he were a slight touched in the head. "You cracked open that rather magnificent bottle of _Château Pétrus_ and then we all climbed on top the roof to watch the fireworks. He fell off, shattered his femur in about several dozen places." He paused a moment, cocking his head thoughtfully to the side. "...perhaps that's why he walks so oddly. To overcompensate for the cracking in the femur..."

Aziraphale dithered further, though what use there was in dragging things out he wasn't sure. A Virtue's memory was unflinchingly accurate and this was hardly a memory what would dim amidst the background noise of recollections past. Crowley had looked particularly memorable in his all but cartwheeling sideways off of the roof into the spattering of startled revellers on the street below. And he was not a demon what was known to handle physical pain well. The ensuring squalling had been enough to drive away every stray cat within a twenty mile radius.

"I... have a vague recollection which... might pertain to-"

Humanitas gave a long, tired sounding sigh. "Aziraphale, we go through this every single time I come to visit. And don't I say the same thing every time? I am not a direct affiliate of Heaven. I am an associate of the Almighty." He pointed towards the floor with his index fingers. "What you get up to down here is of absolutely no concern to me and I have no overriding compulsion, nor obligation to ferry information back to your Celestial counterparts. Your business is your business, my dear boy. Just as my business is my business."

"Yes well, concerning said business... My own I mean." He clarified, for Humanitas was already giving him that warning look once more. "Was wondering now that I have you here, whether I might bend your ear over something?"

"Oh." Humanitas murmured, one of his thick brows arching thoughtfully. One look at the angel's anxious features was enough to tell the Virtue that Aziraphale was troubled. Never the mind his own instinctive capacities to sense emotional disturbance. "I can see this is going to be one of those serious conversations, so if I might be so bold as to make a suggestion?"

"Please. Suggest away."

"Might you fashion up some of that wonderful hot cocoa for us and then if it pleases you we shall make ourselves comfortable and you can tell me all about what has been troubling you?"

"Sounds a rather jolly idea." Aziraphale said agreeably. He still had some time before he was due to start getting ready and opportunities such as these did not present themselves often. It was best to take advantage of them and strike whilst the iron was hot. "Please, have a seat."

Humanitas made himself comfortable on a chair that he carted in from somewhere amongst the stacks (having remembered all too well how territorial a certain demon was regards the study adjacent settee) whilst Aziraphale prepared the cocoa in the kitchenette. Once they had each a warm, steaming mug in hand, the angel settled himself into his well worn study chair and permitted himself the space in which to speak openly about what had occurred over the course of the past year.

He focused predominantly on the diversion of the Apocalypse and how this had in turn resulted in his and Crowley's subsequent discharge from their respective offices. The nature of his and Crowley's relationship, he kept more the purposefully ambiguous. At least for the time being.

"Let me see if I'm getting this straight..." Humanitas was saying, swirling a melting marshmallow about the interior of his right cheek like a sugar deprived chipmunk. "Heaven and Hell intended to execute each of you, because you impeded the Apocalypse out of a manner of self-interest which ultimately acted in unintentional service of the would-be greater good?"

Aziraphale stuttered a little, because that was hardly the long and the short of it.

"Well... that and... you know all the, um..." He cleared his throat. "The, uh... working with the... enemy... thing... Turns out Heaven is not too keen on angel's dolling out the odd temptation on behalf of the opposition." He chuckled self-mockingly. "Who knew?"

"Good show." Humanitas declared, who looked genuinely amused by the tale. His eyes were just about set to dancing in their sockets and he wore a smile which might even be described as 'approving'. "Might I have another marshmallow? They're frightfully good, are they not?"

"Ever so." Aziraphale used a small pair of silver tongs to plop another pink marshmallow into Humanitas's proffered cup. He only ever seemed to eat the pink ones, the angel had observed. Even Virtues, it seemed, had their vices.

"And so now, you and your Fallen friend spend your days in peaceful retirement; going about matters as you deem fit?"

Aziraphale leaned back in his seat, cradling his mug on the rise of his stomach. "Much the same as we have always done. Somewhat. Only now, there's no need to report back. No need for subterfuge, no... well, no pretending that I haven't 'got' a little Fallen friend, as you so refer to him."

"It must be an enormous weight off, really." Humanitas observed. "To not have that particular monkey riding your back."

"It is, rather." Aziraphale took a sip from his cup. "You spend an awful lot of your time looking over your shoulder, though."

"Sounds ever so trying." Humanitas said sincerely. He knew first hand just how persistent and merciless the angels of Heaven could be whence they felt something wedged in their Celestial craw. He too had seen how punitively the rebelling angels had been dealt with and could hardly have imagined Aziraphale's would be 'treasonous' actions to have been handled much differently. "I do feel for you, dear chap."

Having concluded with the 'catching up' portion of their exchange, Aziraphale eased now, with an intense degree of self-consciousness, into the business that he felt most eager to address and the most concerned as to what information he might receive in turn.

The answers he received might be a game changer and there was no one better to put such (admittedly embarrassing) queries to, then one of the Almighty's direct offsiders.

"Might I... ask a question which might come off as sounding potentially... odd?"

Humanitas could not have looked more the delighted then if Aziraphale had just offered to fashion him up balloon animals. Something he had, admittedly, enjoyed a very great deal in the past. "I do ever so like an odd question. Unless if course it pans out to not at all be nearly so odd as I have been led to believe. Down the rose covered path and all. In so saying, please," He waved a hand encouragingly. "Ask your 'odd' question."

Aziraphale hesitated. He wasn't quite sure how to go about with asking this.

"Well... it's... it's perhaps not so much odd as... rather...well, embarrassing but..."

"I declare myself to be more intrigued by the moment."

Aziraphale felt a trembling, though it was not one of the outer extremities. It resonated from somewhere within; a fear what went worlds deeper than the earthly skin.

"You Vices and Virtues have been around a long time. You have lived here on earth in retirement for over six thousand years." He paused, pressed his lips together. It would not have taken a careful observer to take note of the blush what had worked its way up into his cheeks. "Have... during that time have any of you... ever... developed... _feelings_ for one another? What the humans might quantify as... romantic feelings?"

A far less clever a creature would have been able to guess where Aziraphale was coming from. And Humanitas was not and never had been for that matter, a fool.

"Are you and your little demon friend becoming romantic, Aziraphale?" He asked, with a slight, as near to provocative a smile as a Virtue was capable. "Is that what we are rather inelegantly stumbling up on here?"

"It was... it was a hypothetical." Aziraphale tittered awkwardly, leaning over to place his mug on the study table and just about missing the edge entirely.

"An awkwardly phrased hypothetical that you blushed all the way through." For, as previously mentioned, one doesn't wend their way through the vastness of the human condition, without learning a thing or two along the way. And Aziraphale, in spite of his celestial origins, had lived amongst the human race far the longer than he had dwelt in Heaven.

"Oh, forget that I asked." Aziraphale almost snapped, rather the fussily, near upending his cup once more as he attempted to relocate it to further safety in the tabletops centre. He had never much been one for maintaining a cool and collective countenance once his feathers were ruffled. There were some things even a military training could never quite starch the wrinkles from.

"I'll do no such thing. I will forget only in a time and manner of my own choosing, it shan't not be decided on mine own behalf." Said Humanitas, purposefully and perhaps in means of apology, purposefully mangling his words. If there was one thing what was as likely to amuse Aziraphale as the next, it was the uncharacteristic butchering of the English language within the ironic bonds of a bookstore dedicated to the honing and perfecting of such standards. "As it stands to reason, the answer to your ever so blatant 'not' hypothetical is: yes. Of course."

His words were the desperately required validation that Aziraphale had been silently seeking, and the relief at hearing them felt every bit as though a balloon what had been packed full of his anxieties, was now loosed from the stalwart grip of his chest and free to float up and away, clear from sight.

"Of course?"

"Yes. Of course." Humanitas said, looking entirely flummoxed by Aziraphale's enduring confusion. As though the answer to such a question was every bit as obvious as the marshmallows that were floating in his drink. "Like you we have lived amongst humanity for over six thousand years. We have in fact spent more time amongst them than we have in the company of angels and demons. To wit we are in fact far more akin to the human race than we are the surrounding preternatural species with which we might otherwise confer." He took another sip from his cup, leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. The absolute poise what was appropriate for deeper considerations. "Even taking our baser instincts into account, it's quite natural that you develop some learned, affiliate responses. Humans, angels... you were all designed based on a blueprint which was largely copy/pasted from we ourselves. You all had the same creators. Why would you not have similar core functions? Instincts? You're not so disparate, truly. And neither are we."

"When you put it like that..." Aziraphale said, feeling considerably more at ease by the moment. Not that the validation ought to have mattered... Crowley would probably be offended if he knew. "It... it does seem to make a great deal of... sense."

"Well of course it makes sense! Love is a very normal thing which is a universal unifier at days close. Tack a physical body in around that love and the body's hormones, its balances, its inherent drives and BANG! Its various chemicals, neurons and internal wirings transmit its needs and then project whatever love the soul experiences outward." Humanitas held up his middle and index fingers, spaced apart as though offering Aziraphale the universal peace sign. "We find, each of us Vices and Virtues a very strong, intrinsic pull of love towards our counterparts. Invidia and I, for example have extraordinarily passionate reunions when we see one another."

"Physical... reunions?"

Humanitas blinked and then frowned, as though Aziraphale were being purposefully obtuse. "Yes, of course physical! We both have to be physically _present_ to have a reunion!"

"Ah, no. You ah... you misunderstood me. By physical I meant..."

Aziraphale stopped just short of holding his hands up and mashing them together in some crude representation of physical consummation. It may have taken all night for him to have delicately conveyed his meaning in a fashion befitting of an angel posing as a gentleman, so it was fortunate that Humanitas got his point without further need of foolish remonstrations.

"Oh, you mean to kiss and to hold one another. To make love."

"Yes." Aziraphale managed to grunt, near turning about the shade of a cherry tomato in the process. Once the more, Humanitas surprised him in his effacing of genuine nonchalance at the line of questioning.

"Yes. We've done all that. We do all that."

"Ah." Posited the angel, feeling for his part a slight pinch of resentment. Nice that the process came easy for some.

"You look surprised."

"Well... I am a little, if one is to be honest." Aziraphale said, rather the wishing that he had gone and poured himself a nice, big, anxiety alleviating snifter of brandy before embarking down this particular conversation path. It was hardly situated in the wheelhouse to which he was accustomed.

Humanitas had a look on his face as though someone had just drifted across the room, squatted on the carpet in front of him and taken a dump on the antique Persian rug.

"Don't tell me that in the six thousand years you and your little demon friend have been faffing about down here they you haven't had a go of things yourself?" He looked as though something foul tasting had alit to the tip of his tongue and he very much wanted to spit it out.

"No. No we uh, we haven't, actually." Aziraphale replied, who was doing ever so astute a job at curling up into himself such that it would put an agoraphobic snail to shame. "Not so far as... making love is concerned."

They had done quite a bit besides the historically recognized act of physical consummation, that was true. And Aziraphale did in fact wonder whether he ought to be offended by Humanitas's assessment of their having apparently 'faffed around' for the better part of sixty centuries. Sure, they may not have made love or even incorporated a physical dynamic until very recent times, but how was that any true and genuine indicator as to the depth of their feelings for one another? When was the true nature of love an element what might only be measured in the reciprocal exchange of bodily fluids and mashing together of bared flesh?

He and Crowley had shared something wondrously unique and splendid and incontestably intimate in their six thousand years together. Where their human bodies might never have in fact come together, theirs was a communion of the mind and the soul. They had made love at a deeper level; in the exchanging of words and of times spent, in the depth of their glances and their longer, lingering, wanting looks. In the acts of services rendered, without the needing or validation of reciprocation.

Aziraphale was not so enlightened so as to pretend that he was wholly removed from the desire to join with Crowley on a physical level. But he did completely and utterly reject the notion that theirs was time what had been in any way wasted.

"Well, why ever the not?" Humanitas was asking, wrenching Aziraphale back up out of his disconcerted mulling's. "It's all rather good fun. Feels jolly lovely. What the devil have you been doing otherwise? I know it might not have been an option when you were both an employ of your respective realms but you're free agents now. Surely you're in the best position to start exploring some of those feelings?"

Aziraphale took to stammering once more and fussing with those things upon his study desk what in no way shape or form required fussing with. He took a moment, such as was his nature, to figure out how best to broach the subject. And, much as was the want of anyone whom had spent any time in the company of Aziraphale, Humanitas rounded up on the point much sooner than the angel was capable of corralling him towards.

"Oh, I think I know what the problem is. That blasted firewall." Humanitas set his mug down upon the shelf of the bookcase nearest him and leaned forwards in his seat. He appeared genuinely aggrieved now as he took to rubbing at the world weary lines of his tall forehead; uninhibited by so pointless a thing as a hairline. "I knew it was a bloody heinous idea but Castitas was convinced it would help the lesser tiers focus all the more stringently on their duties to the divine. Combined with a human body however, it simply does _not_ balance out."

Aziraphale sat up straight in his seat, his eyes widening purposefully. "Excuse me but, what do you mean when you say 'firewall?'"

Humanitas tapped a finger against his chest; as though this gesture was in some means indicative of where the soul dwelt. "It's a protective mechanism built into the code of every angelic blueprint which is intended to prevent the spirit from outside contamination and to focus all cumulative energies on duty first and foremost to the Almighty. Exempting Archangel's, Seraphim's and Dominion's; who require a degree of select flexibility concerns their decision making processes. For every other tier, however... the firewall was implemented as a sort of... spiritual preserver." He extended both hands now towards Aziraphale, reaching out, it seemed, so as to encapsulate each side of his head like a football. "May I?"

Aziraphale, though uncertain as to the Virtue's intentions, leant forwards with a slightly tremulous look upon his face. His singular assurance was that Humanitas had spoken directly of the very thing that had been tormenting Aziraphale these past few months and the risk presented by a Virtue who was the living definition of 'kindness' dimmed inexorably in comparison.

_If there was... some means as to be... free from it._   
_No. It wouldn't do to get his hopes up._

Humanitas reached out, branching his hands to either side of Aziraphale's face. He pressed his thumbs lightly against each of his temples. Aziraphale got to wondering just how necessary any of this was. The soul was no sooner located within the confines of the skull than it was the concave of his bellybutton.

"Because it was primarily Castitas who was in charge of designing the base parameters of the Firewall, far too much of her own prim and proper reasoning was integrated into the code." Humanitas was saying, staring deeply into Aziraphale's eyes with an intensity the angel was only accustomed to seeing from Crowley. There was a slight vibration purring from beneath each of the Vice's thumbs and Aziraphale could feel something like a distant tickling to the lobes of his brain. "Oh, you poor chap. I can see that your Firewall has taken a fair whack of the corporeal hammer but it's still doing its best to jam itself up in there whenever you have a stray thought." He made a fist and tapped a knuckle gently to Aziraphale's chin. "Sort of like a soccer punch loaded with needles, right on into your celestial spirit, ay old boy?"

"Yes!" Aziraphale all but blurted, almost tipping himself backwards out of Humanitas's grip. The relief at hearing the confirmation of his experiences was staggering. "Yes, that's precisely what it feels like! Oh, the feeling is terrible. I keep trying to explain it to Crowley, but he doesn't' quite seem to be able to get his head around it."

"That's because the sulphur based solution we designed has a viral code which breaks down the firewall when the rebellious angels passed through it. It caused a sort of retroversion, allowing the then 'demon's to act in a manner contrary to their original design. Rather the good job, that one." 

Humanitas lowered his hands, linked his fingers together and set them between his knees. He gave the angel a now very serious look. 

"If you like... I would be more than happy to break down some of that Firewall for you. Allow you a little more freedom with which to move. To explore some of those, aforementioned 'hypothetical' romantic stirrings without feeling as though you're getting a red hot needle into the back of the eye every two minutes."

Aziraphale felt every bit as though his heart had ceased to beat within the cavity of his chest. Perhaps it had.

"You can do that?"

"Of course." Said the Virtue kindly. "I had a hand in designing you, after all. Not you specifically but the race of angels. If you're going to be living out the remainder of your time on earth, you should at least feel free to live with some level of natural autonomy." He smiled as he slapped a hand to Aziraphale's knee and gave it a supportive wiggle. "Such as anyone would have a right to enjoy."

"Would there be any... any side effects?" Aziraphale asked. He had taken to twisting the gold ring he wore on his pinkie finger. The ring he could turn quite as much as he liked but was never able to remove. "Anything... negative, I mean?"

What he wanted to ask, was whether interfering with the 'firewall' would change something about his inherent nature; the whatever it was what made him at his foundations 'him'. Because how was he to know whether the values he held, the things that he believed and the morals he abided by were every bit of his own making just as much as they were a biological construct?

Aziraphale wished to be free of the constrictive spiritual barriers, but not at the expense of potentially changing the truest most nature of himself.

Humanitas seemed to understand his concerns, for he wore an ever the more kindly look on his face as he explained: "The Firewall would no longer be there to act as an inhibitor for when you experience Urges. Which shouldn't be much different, only that you won't get the same pain, the same debilitating sense of guilt. You will be free to explore such thoughts, to let your mind wander." The corners of his bushy moustache lifted as he smiled. "I'm certain you'll find it ever so marvellous."

He might have hesitated; the Aziraphale of days not so distant past. The Aziraphale who had once been more the steadfast in his conviction of there being a definitive construct of right and wrong and black and white. But this was not the same Aziraphale as even that which he had so been in the days leading up to the would-be-Apocalypse. He was an angel- no, he was a _creature_ who was much changed. A creature who wished to facilitate change, to grow outside of those constraints which had for so long been clamped about the borders of his spirit like a merciless vice.

He wanted a life. He wanted a life free from Heaven, a life with Crowley in which they could partake and savour of the very things what would be considered a standard element of the corporeal experience.

He wanted a life in which he could take the person he loved into his arms, kiss them and feel nothing but the pleasure of being close and cherished and tickled pink. Not a life where such things coincided with vicious strokes of pain; punitive measures of an institution he had no desire to remain connected to.

He wanted it severed. He wanted it gone. Every bit as much as he wished to be rid of the confounded gold ring, what was a constant reminder that a part of him would always be wed to the hateful place.

There was nothing doing for the ring. But if there were a key on offer what might free him from the prison in which his eternal spirit was currently incarcerated then he would graciously and eagerly snatch for it.

"Well then... Yes. Yes, I would. Please." He said, and the word, though uttered with the delicate poise of which Aziraphale was long since practiced, held the trace of the desperate plea he was nursing within.

 _Please,_ his eyes said. _Whatever you mean to do, please let it work._

_Take this awful, barbarous thing out of me, so that I can, at long last, be free._

* * *

**~X~**


	41. Or, in which the walls come tumbling down.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Last time I remember the Virtues being on contractual work was right after the beginning." The demon said, who now looked genuinely concerned regarding the unspoken insinuation.
> 
> "Yes. Right after you tempted the woman to bite the apple and ruined their retirement, so I recall." Aziraphale lightly teased. Ironically enough, Crowley did not take the bait. He was distracted, lips pulled back tightly from his teeth. He hissed as another memory scooted to the forefront of his mind.
> 
> "Not to mention-" His eyes flashed towards Aziraphale meaningfully and the angel knew right away what abhorrent event the demon was referencing.
> 
> "Yes. Egypt." He took up the dangling chain of his fob and curled it about his index finger; almost unconsciously. He was anxious and the habit comforted him. "And I think we all know how that one went..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, hair washed, accidental levels of gingerness achieved, dogs dinner prepped and wine glass refreshed. Let's go ahead and hit this third one on the head!

**~X~**

* * *

"Very good." The Virtue said, clapping his hands together and then rubbing his palms as some understated means of grand ceremony. He reached over again, bracing his thumbs to each of Aziraphale's temples. "Stay very still, dear chap. This takes a far whack of concentration."

Aziraphale did as he was bade, sitting so still that a passing bird might have found his uncanny similarity to a statue too tempting to pass by without depositing a crap upon his feathery head. Humanitas was staring into his eyes again, though why he felt the need to do so the angel wasn't quite sure.

But then, he noticed something.

The Virtue's pupils were shifting from side to side, as though observing a ball passing back and forth across a tennis court. His fingertips were moving against Aziraphale's hairline, drumming out a gentle, tuneless beat. His lips formed about the intonations of silently spoken words.

Aziraphale felt then a strange, very much the dissonant sensation what might be most accurately described as tingling. The tingling eased upward gradually, much as the twisting of a peg upon the neck of a guitar tightens the string. The pressure increased, inch by inch until Aziraphale felt as though something was about to violently snap inside of him and then all at once, the tightness slackened and dropped away entirely.

He felt a... softness. Some internal tension easing free. The surge of relief that came with each tiny pull of Humanitas's powers felt much like a sewing hook pulling free a loop of incorrectly woven thread. Aziraphale felt with each passing moment, a broadening beyond what he long since accepted were the definitive edges of his mind. It was stretching out further to each immaterial direction; far greater than he had ever dared to imagine and the prospect of any number of things, once impossible to entertain, now seemed laughably simple and well within reach.

Neither the one of them had noticed the bedroom door swinging open, depositing one slightly dishevelled and sleepy looking demon into their midst. A demon still dressed only in his underpants and who was currently scratching at his left buttock as he drifted towards the liquor cabinet with a yawn.

"Hey, you mind if I grab a drink while I get ready? Feel like I'm gonna need a few under my belt if we're gonna spend the evening breaking bread with that lo-" He turned, already in the midst of pouring Tallisker into a glass what was worlds too large for top shelf whiskey and all but toppled back through the doors of the liquor cabinet, his eyes bulging. "What the Heaven is going on here?!"

He took the bottle by the neck, as though fully intending to hurtle it across the room at the person he presumed to have been accosting Aziraphale, but a hurried snap of the angel's fingers saw it twisted neatly out of Crowley's grasp and returned to the shelf whence it came.

Aziraphale turned his palm about, indicating for Crowley to calm down. The demon did not look happy about it and frowned whilst he waited; so troubled by the whatever it was that was going on that he hadn't even taken a sip of his drink. Something akin, in Crowley's world, to a human not taking a sip of oxygen.

In less than the time what was required to slam the door in the face of an over enthusiastic solar panel salesperson, Humanitas had wrapped up the business he had with Aziraphale's head and eased his hands away.

"There we are. That seems to have brought down the most of the Firewall. Not a great deal of resistance. Six thousand years living amongst humanity was likely to weaken the foundations anyhow." He clapped his palms together, looking over Aziraphale in an almost fatherly fashion. "How do you feel, dear boy?"

Crowley's timing had been fortuitous in some ways. Aziraphale looked to him now; attempted to ignore the concern what held court in the demon's face and turned his attention to other aspects of his physicality.

Granted, the image of him standing there in his singlet, socks and boxer briefs was not one which naturally lent itself to feelings of unbridled passion. So Aziraphale did something which Aziraphale had not often permitted himself to do; he imagined Crowley with no clothes on.

More to the point, he cast his mind back to that evening they had spent in Crowley's flat; where the demon had swanned up out of the bath, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that he was entirely naked.

Aziraphale remembered the way in which the candlelight burnished his skin; flecked by droplets of water, which curved and caressed their gravitational paths downward, replicant of an act Aziraphale would very much have liked to indulge with the palms of his hands.

He imagined doing this very thing. Instead of remaining bug eyed and impotent amidst the soapy bubbles, he too had climbed the stairs, stepped in behind Crowley and taken the towel from his hands. Dried him, rubbing the soft Egyptian cotton along every line of the demon's slender body. Down the decadent inlay of his spine, across the peak of each of his hips.

Over the smooth, pale globes of his perfect, round bottom...

This was the point in which Aziraphale's not so often indulged fantasies usually came to a screeching halt. A halt which was harried by the uncompromising leveraging of a celestial rail road spike smashing down inside of his skull.

But now... there was nothing. Nothing but blessed silence. And Aziraphale was staring at Crowley now, feeling that flush of arousal tighten inside of him and knowing that if he wished, he could do a great deal more than simply round off the fantasy he had tentatively indulged.

He could _live_ it.

"The change is... remarkable." He said, continuing to stare at Crowley, who stared back at him with an expression what was contrarily surmounting to a peak of uncertainty and suspicion. "I feel... free."

Humanitas gave him a clap on the shoulder, which forcibly wrenched the angel out of the trance like state into which he had entered. "Glad to hear it!" He said, easing back into his seat and taking up his still warm mug from the bookshelf alongside of him. "Life should be far the more enjoyable for you now, I expect."

This was all a bit much for a demon who had just awoken from a nap and had a fierce thirst going. He took a gulp from the glass in his hand, so as to alleviate the second complication. It made the fact that he was still tired, perpetually grumpy and, in more recent moments, very confused, somewhat the easier to deal with.

"Um... would someone mind explaining what's going on?" He made a typically dramatic gesture with his arms. "In _very_ small words. Still waking up."

"Oh, Crowley, dear." Aziraphale said, having firmly rerouted himself back to the bonds of reality. He gestured to the Virtue sitting opposite him. "You remember Humanitas, yes?"

"New Years, 1987," Humanitas all but levitated up out of his seat, set his cup down once more and approached Crowley with his arms so wide he might very well have been intending to place them about the trunk of a tree. "Broke your hip in several places."

Crowley hissed as Humanitas drifted closer. The Virtue paid him about as much mind as he might have done the idle fluttering of a lazy moth against a screen door and wrapped the demon up in an entirely unappreciated and increasingly resented hug. Aziraphale looked very amused by the entire exchange; a fact which only irritated Crowley the further.

"Yeah, remember that one." The demon grunted, struggling to free himself from Humanitas's bizarrely strong grip. It wasn't just that Crowley had no desire to be embraced by anyone who wasn't Aziraphale (and, on the odd occasion, his human work colleagues) but the physical proximity of Kindness in corporeal form, made a Fallen angel feel rather sick to the stomach. Being touched by it rendered his stomach about as jippy as it might have done if he had just snaffled down a particularly suspicious smelling scallop. And no one needed to witness the end results of such an event.

"My goodness, I swear you do get more and more handsome every time I see you. I like what you've done with your hair. Very flattering." Humanitas took a step back, glanced up and along the line of Crowley's body and cocked a brow by means of assessment. "Lovely undergarments. Rather concupiscent."

Crowley wasn't at all sure what 'concupiscent meant, but he knew that it made him uncomfortable. He edged himself swiftly over to Aziraphale's coat rack, yanking the angel's own jacket down off of one of the hooks and wrapped it tightly about himself; taking down a scarf and tying it in a rather prudish looking knot about the middle, so as to prevent the halves from drifting open.

"Might have mentioned we had company, Aziraphale." He grumbled, feeling a tad resentful that a place in which he had every reason to feel safe, could just as easily turn into a guest house for whichever celestial 'whosit' decided to drift on in. The angel could do well to impose some standards now that the two of them were... well, rather the more than just the 'two' of them.

"Isn't that sweet how he enforces the use of the word 'we'?" Humanitas chuckled, dispensing an entirely unappreciative pinch to Crowley's near concave cheek. He rounded it off with a slight smack what might have been affectionate, if Crowley had been rather the more stout to have dealt with it. It just about knocked out two of his back molars. "Clearly he is more at peace with this arrangement than you are, dear chap."

"That's hardly an achievement," Aziraphale said with a slight roll of the eyes. "He's always used 'we'." He took note of Crowley's near miasmically radiating discontentment and thought it perhaps the proper thing to address it. "I am sorry, dear. I didn't want to wake you. You needed your sleep and as you can see, well! Everything is just fine."

"Uh-huh." The demon did not sound at all convinced. "Still doesn't answer just what in the name of Heaven I walked in on."

"Humanitas was helping me work through something."

"But you're all right?"

Aziraphale favoured Crowley with a look which he hoped the latter was clever enough to correctly interpret. "Oh... much better than all right."

Crowley was clever, that much was certain. But being clever meant nothing, given the times in which they were currently living. Any number of cards might have been on the table and Crowley was far the more concerned with reading the hand, than examining the dealers eternally ambiguous expression. Sometimes good, old hard fashioned clarity was the appropriate means forward.

Crowley trusted only one person in all of creation and this was Aziraphale alone. He did in fact, trust Aziraphale far the more than he trusted even himself. And physical and spiritual embodiment of kindness or no, Humanitas was a contrary variable, who had no moral ties to either of them. He had most certainly been a friend to Aziraphale all these long centuries on earth, but it was not a friendship or an alliance what was in any way shape or form reminiscent of that which was shared by the two of them.

"Super. Say, pop on through to the bedroom with me a moment, would you?" Crowley, still pinching the halves of Aziraphale's coat tightly between his hands, marched for the bedroom and pushed the door open. The angel looked to him in positive confusion.

"Why?"

Crowley gave him a pointed, wide eyed look from the bedroom door. "I forgot where you keep the _bed_ , come and show me, would you?" He jerked his head and his thumb towards the interior of the room in a gesture what required little further in the way of explanation.

Aziraphale, naturally understanding of the fact that Crowley was likely confused by what he had walked in on, excused himself and followed the demon into the bedroom. As he was closing the door, he caught sight of Humanitas flashing him a wink and what he took to be a supportive thumbs up. Well, really. There was a time and place for such things.

Once the door was firmly shut, Crowley took it upon himself to shed Aziraphale's coat. He plucked up the spare dressing gown what he had taken to keeping at the bookstore off of the back of one of the decorative chairs and slung it about himself.

"You're definitely all right?" He asked, tying the cord in a messy knot about his midsection. There was a great deal of worry treading water in the depths of his eyes and Aziraphale could hardly the help in being touched by it.

"Yes, of course I'm all right. You know Humanitas. He and I have been catching up since the beginning."

"First time I've seen him working magic on your skull." Crowley said, which was a fair and reasonable point. It was not the sort of thing a demon was accustomed to seeing after waking up from a nap. And in spite of all the erstwhile good intentions of what was perhaps the fairest of their kind, Humanitas was still a Virtue and they were a species what was not to be trifled with lightly.

Aziraphale, in contrast to Crowley's unease, was burbling with excitement. That sort of excitement what made you ineloquent in your keenest of desires to express it. "You should be glad for the magic; he's worked out this horrid failsafe mechanism which the Virtues designed as part of an angel's blueprint." He was near bouncing out of his wingtips, so pleased was he by the success of the venture. "The barbs, my dear. He has taken away those dreadful barbs what were keeping me prisoner!"

The demon raised a brow; both carefully and sceptically. He had taken the stance in recent times of not permitting himself to get his hopes too high. Less painful when the inevitable fall brought you crashing down.

"Think it works?"

Some matters in life, are more the more aptly proven by a physical demonstration then by any number of words you might otherwise assign to them. Aziraphale was perhaps only a novice in the walking of this particular path, but he was a fast learner. And a keen learner, at that.

He looked to Crowley's eyes; eyes which were every bit as lovely as every sweet, precious piece of the demon's eternal spirit. He closed then the slight, yet interminable distance between them; reaching out to place his palm against the tender slope of Crowley's cheek. His fingertips played the familial, cherished arches of those sumptuous cheekbones; those edges what were indicative of every other portent avenue of the demon's body.

Aziraphale cast his mind outwards, to occupy those other, once forbidden spaces. To the spaces in fact, what dwelt between. Allowed himself to ponder how the taking and the tasting and the possessing of those particular spaces might feel.

Desire rushed through him, flowered into verdant blooms of arousal and with those exquisite deepening of breaths and the flushing of flesh came nothing but the urge to push further still. Push further in, take hold of those wanting, pliant edges and draw it back towards himself.

For once, there was no pain. And for once, Aziraphale felt every bit as at ease with the pleasure as did all the other creatures what currently resided upon God's green earth. The relief staggered him. It was palpitating. Intoxicating.

He leaned in, put his lips to Crowley's and kissed him more the deeply than he had ever done in all the exchanges they had thus far shared. He felt for once an easement. The strain what had perpetually existed about the borders of his celestial spirit had been severed and with it, the pain what had kept him in benighted check.

There was nothing now what could hold him back. Nothing that could prevent him from demonstrating the depth and breadth and the enormity of what it was that he felt for Crowley. The inexpressible hunger, seeking nourishment in the form of his eager kiss; a kiss what was so rich and lingering and sumptuous, that it all but dissolved every stern muscle in the demon's body. Rendered him as pliant and as malleable within the angel's hands, as a fistful of pasta takes to softening when plucked from the bonds of boiling water.

"Oh..." The demon was heard to remark in some moments following. A demon who was, as to be expected, attempting to play it cool but was rather the too caught up with all the tangled miasma of 'goody' what was currently serpentining about the mushy bog of his once tired brain. "I... th-think I get where you're... you're coming from."

Aziraphale chuckled softly, for there was nothing so lovely in all the world then a bashful Crowley. It brokered a strange balance of feelings inside of him; an equal parts want to protect and then to possess.

A strange thing, it would seem. But a true thing. A right thing.

"No pain." The angel murmured softly, brushing his lips against Crowley's. Lips what parted; eager and expectant of the kiss what he felt surely, was intended to follow. "Nothing but love."

The demons brows lifted knowingly. " _Only_ love?" He queried. He knew full well, that there was much more at play here than mere feelings of affection. They were pressed tight to one another and the evidence of Aziraphale's far the less angelic designs, was currently making itself known against the pillar of the demon's inside thigh.

"Well..." The angel softly replied, pressing a kiss now to the shell of Crowley's all too receptive ear. "...mainly love."

Perhaps it was the heat. Perhaps it was the barriers of all known kinds coming down. Perhaps it was the presence, unbeknownst to them of Greed and Lust, profligating amongst the undercurrent energies of the city in which they currently dwelt.

Perhaps, more the likely, that it was all these things. A perfect, unforseen, unprecidented alignment. But that very night was the night what was to be different to every eve what fell before it. Aziraphale and Crowley sensed it. They sensed it in the coming together of yet another kiss, in no way inferior to that which they had only just shared.

They sensed it in the tightening, thirsting want of the cords of their bodies; the stretching up and closer and irrepressibly the deeper into the bonds of one another's arms.

Little however was the interpretation required when it came to the understanding of certain matters. How Aziraphale's hand cupped to the peak of Crowley's shoulder bone as they kissed and murmured and softly keened their desires into the waiting breath of one another. How those fingers splayed, traced and wended their way further downward; sensually and indulgently purveying the indent of the demon's waist, the portent splay of his hips.

How the hand descended further still, taking into its clutch the swell of the demons pert buttock. Aziraphale squeezed, harder then he had ever done before. By that grip he felt a near irrepressible urge to somehow lift the demon up into the eagerly awaited port of himself. To sunder him, attain him. To lend marks across the tableau of his flesh; bruises as unequivocal evidence of his deep, aching want.

Marks, it would seem, that Crowley himself was more the ready and willing to receive. Aziraphale felt the demon's bottom lip drop open and the soft, almost uncharacteristic intake of air. A gentle, yearning gasp what was indicative of a softness, an erstwhile vulnerability which Crowley had spent many the thousands of years dutifully attempting to convey from sight.

It was a concession what piqued Aziraphale's hunger to greater, more gnawing depths still. Without the bonds in place to provide him some manner of context, he pondered briefly as to whether or not he might be capable of restraining himself.

He had never wanted something so fiercely.

Not even the crepes that he had been willing to die for, could compare to this.

"Well... thank _you,_ Humanitassss." Crowley chuckled and his hands were now bunching in the back of Aziraphale's cardigan, pulling him inward as though the angel were caught in a virulent riptide and the very sense that he was about to go falling headlong into something that was happening altogether too quickly for comfort was enough to shake the cobwebs out of the angel's brain.

It took a degree of personal strength what would astonish most human males but then Aziraphale was, of course, neither human nor male and even without his celestial failsafe's, was capable of pulling things into perspective.

He didn't much want to, but it pleased him nonetheless that he was able to. The fact that he was able, in spite of every corporeal instinct, to raise his hand and press his fingers against Crowley's incoming lips, was reassuring. To know that it was not just his celestial ties what kept him in check, but a tried and true facet of himself. Of his own morals, values and learnings and well, fact to the matter, common sense, which existed irrespective of his biology.

"Perhaps we had better... pull up short there." He said and felt very the proud of himself for saying so. It was a little more difficult to maintain this sense of achievement with Crowley's luminescent eyes pining at him from over the alpines of his assiduously filed fingernails.

"I thought you said there was no pain?" The demon asked, somewhat the muffled as a result of the fingertips pressed against his lips.

"There's not, it's just that," Aziraphale jerked his head towards the door, lowering his voice as an afterthought. "- _he's_ still out there!"

"You gave him a cup of cocoa. Sure he's set for a while."

"Crowley!" Aziraphale took his hand away from the demons lips and leaned in closer. Lowering his voice the further still. "Doesn't it strike you as just the slightest bit odd? Hells council and Heaven's choir wanting to meet with us tonight and right before we're due to set out, we receive a visit from one of the Virtues?"

"You raise a good point." Crowley conceded, his fingers trailing down and idly plucking apart the buttons holding Aziraphale's vest closed. "Perhaps we should discuss it in more detail..."

Aziraphale observed the demon's hand movements with mounting confusion. "...Why are you unbuttoning my waistcoat?"

"Just... didn't think it wanted to be part of the conversation."

Aziraphale sighed, slapping the demons fingers away and rethreading the buttons he had only just managed to loosen.

"Might you be capable of getting your hormones under control just long enough for us to have a serious conversation?"

Crowley shrugged. "'Scuse me for thinking that if someone starts the motor they're getting ready to drive the car..." He said, somewhat priggishly.

"Humanitas mentioned something about being in London on... contractual work." Aziraphale stated, ignoring Crowley's rather offhand comment about the car. He wasn't quite sure that he got what it meant, anyway.

This remark about contractual work had definitely caught the demons' attention. His brows furrowed thoughtfully and he glanced towards the door; taking a quick sniff of the air so as to ensure that the Virtue had not thought to sneak on up and eavesdrop. Humanitas' scent was still centralized firmly within the study space, which likely meant that he had not budged an inch from the chair in which he was earlier seated.

"Last time I remember the Virtues being on contractual work was right after the beginning." The demon said, who now looked genuinely concerned regarding the unspoken insinuation.

"Yes. Right after you tempted the woman to bite the apple and ruined their retirement, so I recall." Aziraphale lightly teased. Ironically enough, Crowley did not take the bait. He was distracted, lips pulled back tightly from his teeth. He hissed as another memory scooted to the forefront of his mind.

"Not to mention-" His eyes flashed towards Aziraphale meaningfully and the angel knew right away what abhorrent event the demon was referencing.

"Yes. Egypt." He took up the dangling chain of his fob and curled it about his index finger; almost unconsciously. He was anxious and the habit comforted him. "And I think we all know how _that_ one went."

"Yeah. Ten fun filled plagues later..."

"Call me an old silly if you like but I'm rather prone to distrust in what might otherwise be perceived as coincidences. Given matters, of late."

Crowley crossed his arms, twisting his lips once more off to the side in that particular way he had when he was mulling something over in his head. "Want me to try poking around a little?" He asked.

"He's very particular about not letting anything slip." The angel replied uncertainly. After all, it wasn't as though he had gone to any great strains attempting to extract information out of the Virtue himself. Humanitas had simply removed the option from the table and Aziraphale, being an angel, was rather the biologically obligated to respect his wishes.

"Hey. I'm a demon," Crowley said, giving a very appropriate snake like grin. "Poking's kind of in the job description."

"Well you _are_ rather good at it," Aziraphale acknowledged. He smiled somewhat guiltily. "You've managed to 'poke' me around to any number of things over the years."

"Some with greater degrees of success than others..." The demon murmured pointedly, hardly bothering with softening the somewhat resentful words. Aziraphale ignored him. What point was there in grizzling about the past? No amount of hurt feelings was going to grind the wheels of time into reverse.

"Couldn't hurt, I suppose." The angel said, thinking that if there was anyone what might be able to wring the information out of a dry sponge like Humanitas, it would be Crowley. The very reason he had been assigned to earth in the first place (aside from his having driven his Hellish cohorts up their filth covered walls) was because he was clever, inventive and particularly adept when it came to crafting a purposeful turn of phrase.

Crowley could line up his words the way that a skilled hunter might prepare a trap. Allow you to drift on in, to feel safe and comfortable, before then bringing down the steel jaws and snaring your foot between them.

He had managed to entrap Aziraphale any number of times in the years of their first acquaintance. But Aziraphale was no slouch himself in the cleverness department and he had quickly learned, through repeated exposure and quiet study of the demon's behaviour, how the gears of that particular demonic clock got to ticking. Had started to pick up on subtle cues, changes of expression, body language, lilting of voice; all things what preceded him making some attempt at entrapment.

And so of course, when Crowley observed that he was no longer getting the desired result with his stock standard approach, he was forced to adapt. And to adapt. And to adapt further still. It was quite true that regardless of his great love and respect for Aziraphale that he would never stop trying to trip him up with a deftly woven war of the words. It was a cherished pattern he had maintained for over six thousand years now and both the angel and the demon would feel entirely lost without it.

"What'll you give me if I get him to talk?" Crowley asked and quirked a brow as Aziraphale looked to him with his face scrunched at the borders from confusion. "Hey. I'm not just giving it away _,_ angel."

"Oh... I don't know," Aziraphale gave a truly munificent smile. "Love and respect."

Crowley stared back at him with the sort of look that suggested Aziraphale would do well so as to start taking matters seriously. "... yeah, I was thinking something slightly more tangible than that."

"Well, what else am I suppose to offer you? A biscuit? Do you want a biscuit in return for turning tricks, Crowley?"

Crowley was forced to batten down a laugh. "I don't think you really understand what 'turning tricks' means Aziraphale. And I'm not a bloody performing circus seal."

"Circus seals traditionally prefer fish to biscuits, last I checked..."

"You know what I mean." Crowley jerked a thumb towards the bedroom door. "Eleven minutes. The couch. Well making out. Break the ten minute record."

Aziraphale pulled a face to show precisely what he thought of this tawdry offer. ""Making out"? What, like we're a couple of adolescents in the back row of the movie theatre?"

"Just so. All arms, all lips," Crowley pursed his own as rather unnecessary means of demonstration. "-all _rouler une pelle."_

"I don't know what that means." Aziraphale said, feeling that small flush of annoyance what was specially reserved for whenever the French language sought to sashay itself about in front of him. Particularly when the form of that presentation came from Crowley's eternally smug, effortlessly multi-lingual mouth.

 _"Galocher._ " The demon offered, sticking out his tongue and swishing it from side to side in a manner Aziraphale found unnecessarily provocative. He got the meaning well and good however, if the blush what had hiked its way up into the hillocks of his cheeks was to be trusted.

"No getting up to answer the phone, attend to unwelcome guests or demould the grouting." Crowley added, reaching over and tapping a fingertip to the deep rut what had formed between Aziraphale's heavy brows. "Put your new barb free brain to the test, eh?"

Aziraphale had taken to rubbing his hands together with such dexterity that it was a wonder his palms hadn't yet caught fire. He had every desire to be close to Crowley, that much was true, but he continued to nurse some reservations as to how they might indulge those urges now that his 'firewall' had been for the most part removed.

Who was to say that what had started out as a cut and dry bit of _'galocher'_ on the settee, might then transgress quickly into something else? The barbs had always been there to provide Aziraphale with a much resented stopping point in the not so distant past. What if now, he simply wasn't able to help himself and kept... going?

He had always been bad at saying no to the things he took pleasure in. And this was pleasure with which he had significantly less experience with.

And it wasn't as though he could expect Crowley to be the sensible one in these situations. The demon had made it very clear that he was well and truly along for the ride whenever things became physical between them. He was all too happy to toss Aziraphale the wheel and simply lean on back and take whatever was coming with a big, self-satisfied smile on his face.

Aziraphale was jerked up out of his thoughts by the sound of Crowley taking up his watch from the bedside table and loudly tapping the glass face with his fingernail. "Tick-tock, he's not going to wait around forever."

The angel sighed, thinking it a rather strange thing for Crowley to insist on negotiating. The information was, after all, relevant to them both. And they were a team, as the demon was ever so fond of reminding him. A side all their very own.

Aziraphale looked at Crowley's face and realized suddenly that this was not an outright act of historical opposition of which the demon felt compelled to enact.

It was a game.

He felt foolish for not having seen it for what it was. For weeks now he had been witness to the change in Crowley's behaviour; the awkward flirting, the attempts at being seductive which were often the more clumsy and adorable then genuinely alluring. The way in which he all but twined his slender body about Aziraphale like a cat, wanting to be stroked along the length of its spine and fed a four-star fish supper.

Aziraphale knew that if he put his foot down and insisted upon it, that Crowley would more the likely still make his best attempt at extracting information from Humanitas. Demon or not, he was a loyal creature and fiercely protective of their exclusive 'team'.

But he was also sneaky and cunning and, in much more recent times, especially amorous. He was having his fun with the situation, which was ever so typically in line with how Crowley approached most of his ventures.

 _Just because you serve the cake doesn't mean you can't take a slice for yourself,_ he had once told Aziraphale, who had crossed paths with him at some swanky gala event in 1771 at the newly established Sandringham House in Norfolk. They had both been there for work related purposes of course but Crowley had been thoroughly enjoying himself in the mixing of business and pleasure; sampling expensive wines by the glassful, snuffling canapé's and hissing temptations into the ears of any would be influencers who just so managed to drift in close enough for him to not be required to put any extra effort in seeking out.

Aziraphale could hardly have judged him for this. He was no better of course. He was right there alongside, elbow deep in the hors d'oeuvres, topping up Crowley's glass whenever it had gotten upsettingly low.

What true forces to be reckoned with, they were.

"Five minutes." Aziraphale finally offered, having decided to permit Crowley the game that he wished to play. "And I will turn the sign around to Closed, so there shouldn't be any guests drifting on in."

Crowley bit the corner of his lip, considering the offer. He apparently found it wanting (hardly surprising, giving it cut his current recorded makeout time by half) because he provided then a counter offer:

"Seven minutes and you take off your cardigan and unbutton your vest."

Aziraphale almost chuckled. What a ridiculous situation. And yet, here they were, indulging it all the same. "Six minutes and I'll take off my cardigan. ... And undo two buttons."

The dance was underway. It perhaps would have served them both right if Humanitas had tired of being left to his own devices and simply up and made his way out of the store, but such a demonstration would have been considered far too rude for a Virtue of kindness. In so saying, he was held hostage by want of his own inherent sensibilities.

"... Six minutes," Crowley insisted, with a shrewd look what was so intense you might have thought him trying to peer right on past Aziraphale's skin, down into the marrow of his bones. For whatever good such a subjective inspection might have wrought. "You take off your cardigan, undo two buttons and your bow tie so that I can see your throat for a change."

Aziraphale considered. It sounded reasonable. Two buttons would still leave plenty behind with which to maintain the sanctity of his waistcoat. And the chest what dwelt beyond it. It didn't seem a particularly risky concession.

And he did rather like it when Crowley kissed his neck...

"... All right, fine." He said, in a resigned tone of voice which suggested he might have been negotiating the splitting of an estate, rather then the circumstances of mutually shared physical pleasure. They shook hands on it, with such seriousness and formality that Crowley could not help but smile. "Just no... touching below the..." Aziraphale awkwardly indicated downwards. "-the uh... the waist..."

Crowley scoffed. "Someone sure has tickets on themselves. Fine. Good luck keeping your hands off of my arse, that's all I can say."

"I meant..." Aziraphale hissed, flushing with embarrassment as he waved his hand in the vague dimension of what might have been his pelvic region. "-around the... _front_ of the waist."

 _And what cheek,_ he thought, watching as Crowley grinned and bit his lower lip in that admittedly sensual way that he had developed. _Does he truly believe that without the firewalls in place I'm about to devolve into some craven sex maniac? Clearly, I still have_ some _control of myself._

_A fine one to talk; suggesting that it is I who have 'tickets'. When here he stands fairly much claiming to be so irresistible that I would lack the self-control required so as to keep my hands off of him._

"Ahhh, I see. All comes out in the wash now, doesn't it, angel?" Crowley was saying, still wearing a grin what a considerably less classy person might ascribe to an individual who imbibes faecal matter as he reached about to smack his palm smartly to Aziraphale's backside. "See? Ain't so bad at getting what I want, am I?"

"Oh yes." Aziraphale said, thinking it high time he went ahead and took the demon down a peg or two. He was acting far too smug for Aziraphale's tastes. "If Humanitas has six thousand years to spare, we'll be laughing."

He could barely keep a straight face to see Crowley's own features plummet to the metaphorical ground floor. He recovered in admirably short order, gathering the shattered fragments of his expression up and reassembling them to form a now rather cool, unimpressed look which he directed back at an angel what was only barely keeping his own delight under wraps.

"... Well that was a bit salty." Crowley finally said and Aziraphale could do nothing now to prevent the chuckle what lilted out. "Don't be surprised now if the back of my hand doesn't just accidentally go and brush against something front waist specific."

With that somewhat considerably bizarre threat levelled, Crowley straightened, tucked and tightened his dressing gown and swanned out of the bedroom with as much dignity as an offended demon could muster. Humanitas was to be found precisely in the same spot in which he had been left; attending to Crowley's presence with the sort of warm, accommodating smile most humans might roll out when in the presence of a basket of kittens.

This was all very ordinary. For whatever the reason, Humanitas clearly thought Crowley to be adorable. He had in fact, once spent an entire afternoon back in the late 1600's, petting him on the head; unconcerned by Crowley's repeated attempts to bite him.

What was worse, was that the attention was nowhere near the realms of what might be considered creepy. It was as though Humanitas viewed Crowley as both a small child in need of constant pampering and reassurance and a funny little pet which he still cherished even though it had nipped his fingers countless times over.

It was this very bizarre facet of unconditional love which Crowley was now going to make every attempt to manipulate.

* * *

**~X~**


	42. Or, in which an angel and a demon start to catch on.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Summary:  
> And to this, Aziraphale did in fact laugh. For what more could he do, given the situation? Given the lunacy of their not so distant meddling, the ridiculousness that was the earth, the kingdoms and everything else thereof?
> 
> He could laugh because, in spite of the great unknown and all the terrible potential it might yet pose, there was Crowley, still with a smile, still with a clever thing to say and still every inch the one and only person he would care enough to trudge through the encroaching bog of absolute absurdity with.
> 
> What little could you do but laugh in the face of such things?

**~X~**

* * *

"So, Humanitas..." Crowley immediately chastised himself for how cheery he sounded. He _never_ went out of his way to play up to the Virtue's ridiculous pleasantness and it would seem a strange thing for him to start doing so now. "How the Heaven have you been? You're looking good. Moustache has grown in. Fancy a drink?"

He jerked his thumb towards the liquor cabinet and Aziraphale, who had drifted out of the bedroom in his wake, did his utmost not to roll his eyes. It was Crowley's standard go to, in the means of getting his way. Heap whatever it was the person he was attempting to manipulate liked onto them in copious amounts, liquor them up so that their defences naturally dropped and then worm on in there and slip subversive suggestions between the cracks of their vulnerability.

It was hardly craftsmanship. But then again, he himself had fallen for it thousands of times over, so one could hardly argue that it wasn't effective.

Humanitas smiled, tapping a finger against the near almost drained mug in his hands. "Oh, thank you dear chap, but Aziraphale was already kind enough to prepare me one."

Crowley, undeterred, waved his hand dismissively. "Not one of those sugary rubbishy things; I meant a grown up person's drink. Glass of wine, single malt scotch... snifter of absinthe?" He rounded off, with such a blatantly suggestive smile that Aziraphale was forced to retire to the kitchenette, so that his disgust with the insincere charade would not be made obvious.

Humanitas, somewhat the more refined and prudish a creature, checked the aged leather watch what adorned his wrist. If he had been the judgemental type, he might have quirked a questioning brow at Crowley in blatant, middle-class admonishment.

"It's... it's not even six o'clock yet, lad."

"Eh... six o'clock somewhere, ay?" And because Humanitas continued along in the vein of looking entirely affronted, added: "Well, hope you don't mind if I crack on. Tough job but someone's gotta do it, am I right?"

"Oh, by all means. Don't let me stand in the way of your self-medicinal strategies." The Virtue replied with a truly beneficent smile, which hardly suited the somewhat backhanded statement he had just made. Crowley however was never one to be offended when it came to how other people assessed his own largely enjoyed vices. It took a lot for a supernatural creature to get drunk and he was a creature what would happily drink from dawn until... well, _dawn_ if the urge so took him.

Sometimes a good drink was the only thing what had eased the passing of those very long years spent on earth. The fourteenth century came to mind. How he could have dragged himself through that dismal, mind numbing crapfest without alcohol did not bear thinking about.

Crowley poured himself a large, neat glass of single malt (not bothering of course with measuring out the fingers) and made rather the ham-handed display of sipping at it. He had plainly forgotten the existence of the whiskey he had earlier intended to partake but given Crowley's nose for alcohol, it was more the likely to be scooped up again and enjoyed at some later portion of the evening.

"Ah. ... Good stuff this. Hint of vanilla, traces of spice." Crowley tapped the side of the glass. " _Balvenie 1401._ Aziraphale always has the best top shelf." He turned, raised the crystal glass above his head and waggled it in the direct of the kitchenette. "You want one, angel?"

Aziraphale poked his head out from around the corner; tea towel in one hand and a still wet plate in the other. "I'll be fine for the moment, thank you. Got some washing up to tend to first." Of course, it was not the washing up what prohibited him from being able to partake in a drink. Rather, his decision to abstain was more out a want to keep his wits about himself for the upcoming meeting with their former employers. Unlike Crowley, he was not particularly quick on his toes under the weight of inebriation.

"Welp, more for me." Crowley replied cheerfully, turning back now to Humanitas and waggling the glass from side to side in that ever so way in which the amber liquid caught the dim lighting of the lamps beautifully. He had stationed himself in just the right place within the room so as to ensure this would happen. He was a demon that was not without its tricks. "Last chance...?"

Whether it was any of the aforementioned little tricks, or Humanitas not wishing to offend he couldn't say. But the Virtue did in fact finally relent; setting his mug back down upon the shelf with that characteristic 'go on' sway of the head.

"Oh... why not? Won't be the end of the world, as they say."

"Good man. Virtue. Whatever." Crowley poured Humanitas a drink what was indisputably more generous then might have been strictly necessary. But who knew just how much alcohol was required for loosening the inhibitions of creatures what had been around even longer than an angel and a demon? "Hmm... maybe we should toast to something. Whaddya think?"

"Hm. Seems like a fine idea. Well then," Humanitas took his glass and raised it. "To you and to dearest Aziraphale. And the imminent, much belated and undoubtedly raucous love making you are well overdue to partake."

Something shattered into dramatic, porcelain pieces within the kitchenette. Crowley only just managed to maintain his grip upon his glass; no small wonder as he was concentrating the majority of his efforts into forcing the blush back out of his cheeks.

_Don't let him rattle you. Bastard's either just that glib and good natured, or he's purposefully trying to shake you._

"Much as I would love to toast to that," Crowley said, doing his very best to not appear the least bothered by the aforementioned statement (And more to the point, not to descend rapidly into what might have been gleefully indulgent fantasies in more quiet a setting). "I think there are more important matters that deserve our good will, don't you?" He made rather the show of mulling this over a moment before exclaiming, much in a manner what might behove that of a B movie actor: "Ah! Like... the aversion of the Apocalypse! Here's to the world not ending, ay?"

Something flickered within the undercurrent of Humanitas's otherwise unflinchingly maintained façade.

"Oh. Yes. Yes a fine thing to toast to." He raised his glass. He smiled. Some of that smile did not manage to board the flight what was on route to his eyes. "To the world not ending."

Crowley raised his glass. He made a point not to focus too keenly on Humanitas's face but to maintain exceptionally careful control over his own features. "And many, many, many more happy years of Earth to come. ... many, many." He paused a moment, let the words hang in the air like a falling leaf caught upon a reticent thermal. "Many, many, many, many."

Humanitas's face gave the ever so slightest twitch at the words but then he managed to smile and brought his glass up neatly beneath the awning of his moustache to sip from his drink. It was rather a long, rather deliberately deep sip.

Satisfied, Crowley swaggered over to deposit himself in his habitual nook upon the corner settee. He paused long enough to neatly swoop one half of his dressing gown back over the leg what was put briefly on display.

Unintentional, of course. Crowley might have gone to great lengths to get what he wanted, but he had little to no understanding as to how he might effectively 'seduce' someone so as to achieve it. He could barely figure out how to do so with Aziraphale, and this was someone who actually cared for his attentions.

"So... just out of curiosity, what exactly is the work God has contracted you to do?" He enquired. The blatancy all a part of the dance, of course. "Aziraphale mentioned something about you being in town on... business?"

Humanitas turned his glass about in his hand, a patient smile taking form of his lips.

"My dear boy, I can't talk about any of that. It's part of the contract. No discussing of Vices and Virtues specific affairs with person's not having been pertained to within the contract itself."

"Listen," Crowley said, permitting some of the genuine irritation he was starting to experience leach into his tone. "I'm really well rather shot of beating around the bush. We just got done with one bloody near-Apocalypse and if there's something going down that's going to inconvenience any long term plans relating to either myself or my angel friend, I would appreciate knowing ahead of time so that I might go ahead, liquidate my stocks and make like the good shepherd."

"Good or bad shepherd, I'm afraid there's absolutely nothing I can tell you so as to better inform as to how you might in turn, get the 'flock' out of here." Humanitas was staring intently at Crowley, clearly not the least interested in continuing that particular thread of conversation. Because now he said: "Your eyes are very big, aren't they? Aziraphale," He called towards the kitchenette. "How the blazes do you ever get anything done around here with these gorgeous eyes staring at you all the time? Hypnotic they are. Never mind what that dressing gown does for that pert little bottom of yours. Lucky I'm a one Vice Virtue or you would most certainly be in trouble, laddie."

Crowley felt genuinely undone and he shifted uncomfortably in his seat with a disconcerted frown on his face. It would seem he was not the only one whom had a way of getting under people's skin.

"Don't you go looking at my... pert little bottom. That's Aziraphale's bottom." He grumbled, taking a gulp from his glass what nearly drained it in its entirety.

Humanitas winked. "Oh, I'm sure that it is."

 _"_ No! No, that's not what I- What I meant was, only Aziraphale's allowed to notice whether it's... pert or... not - look, would you stop trying to throw me off?!" Crowley had all but effectively tied himself into a big knot of embarrassed self-consciousness from which he wasn't at all sure how he was going to escape. "What are you _doing_ here?!"

"I was returning a book." Humanitas replied innocently. "And visiting an old friend."

"No you're not, you're plotting something! You can't fool an old plotter, I've been plotting since long before it was fashionable!" Crowley waved a finger airily towards the awning ceiling of Aziraphale's shop. "I might very well have come down in the big shower Virtue, but I sure as Heaven didn't come down in the _last_ shower. You're up to something."

Humanitas set his glass down carefully on the shelf nearest him, making a neighbour of the coffee mug he had placed there earlier. "I'm afraid you are only going to get the same answer in response, my handsome young friend and that answer is still a concise and ever more concrete 'no'. Weren't you able to tie a cherry stem into a knot with your tongue if memory serves?"

"Yes. Still can. Still not going to attempt to do so when the cherry is in your mouth. Now, tell me about the work God has contracted you to do, or I'll-"

"Oh, you'll do what precisely?" Humanitas asked, the tone of his voice conveying amusement more so then suggestion of a threat. The twinkle in his eyes said that he remembered all too well how similar conversations had gone in the past and, more to the point, how such exchanges had ended up.

Crowley was left feeling a little stumped. He had not been anticipating the conversation getting this far. And now that he had, he wasn't at all sure what he was supposed to do about it.

Of course, if Humanitas had been a human, it would have been all too simple to have thrown a scare into him. Crowley had lots of scares up his sleeves; each rather the more creative and blood curdling than the last.

Much of the terror that human beings experienced when confronted with any of these particular scares however, was due in no small part to their limited acquaintance with the supernatural world. Science had ironically helped a great deal in that regard; never before had the human race felt so self assured, so convinced of their being alone in the universe. It made the systematic and often virulent usurping of their expectations far the more successful.

Science could explain so much. How then, could it possibly explain the fact that a mans face had just exploded into some bestial creature, with thirteen eyes, acidic saliva and teeth what might have otherwise been found in the jawbone of a Megalodon? Humans had a very hard time these days, attempting to reconcile such things.

But Humanitas was not human. He was a Virtue and every bit aware of the supernatural ins and outs of this world and those what dwelt beyond its tattered curtain. Add to this the fact that he clearly found Crowley to be about as threatening as a custard tart, and the demon was effectively swinging for the ropes.

They were rational considerations, to be sure. And Crowley could oftentimes be rational, if the urge took him. But he was first and foremost an ostensibly stubborn creature and stubborn creatures have about the same capacity for common sense as a late afternoon bicyclist has for not holding up traffic.

Crowley spent a long while staring Humanitas down (an exercise entirely fruitless in its execution, but one he felt was more so required for the sake of posturing) before then swinging his hand up and snapping his fingers. He himself had little to no idea just what trick he was intending to perform and, more to the point, knew that it would not have mattered either way. The gesture itself was the point, not the end result.

To wit, the demon shortly thereafter found himself ejected violently out of the settee, suspended seven feet above the floor as though he were skydiving in a space what was entirely unsuited for the activity. His glass was jerked from between his fingers and barrel rolled through the air before landing neatly on Aziraphale's desk. The scotch what had until recent moments occupied it, formed a golden trail what cascaded down through the air, as though following a trail carved by imaginary rocks and interred itself back within its original glass bonds.

"Oh, that was ever so charming. I'm not sure what it is you were about to do, but I'm quite sorry to say it was never about to work out in your favour, dear boy." Humanitas tapped a finger to an unseen point in the air and Crowley dropped, with a not at all the elegant sounding yelp, back towards the ground. Owing to his better nature, the Virtue had, of course, fashioned up some rather plump, foam stuffed cushions (feathers would have been far too unkind) for him to land upon.

Crowley grumbled, feeling exceptionally unstylish as he whipped the lower segments of his dressing gown back around so as to cover his legs. He had forgotten about this particular aspect of a Virtue's magical capacity; their ability to cast magic directly into another entity's body. A typeset what was mainly integrated so as to gift them with extraordinarily advanced healing properties; greater still than that which was in possession of angels.

Vice's did not retain this faculty. Their magic, though incontestably stronger, was little different in its precepts than that which was wielded by the Fallen. And it was perhaps a very good thing, given that the Vices were not nearly so even natured as their predominantly gentle counterparts.

Gentle counterparts who apparently had no compunctions about using their singularly superior abilities to humiliate where so desired.

"You know..." Crowley hissed, attempting to hurl himself up out of a scattering of cushions so dense you would be forgiven for thinking you might have wandered up on a hippy's love den. "For being the apparent epitome of kindness, you can be a right proper prick when it suitsss you."

He made so as to flop back down onto the settee, missing the subtle tap of Humanitas's finger once more to some intangible point in the air. He did not however, miss the blinding pain what suddenly lanced itself to each of his buttocks; as though he had attempted to perch himself atop a pair of burning irons.

"What the-?!" Crowley turned, stared open mouthed at the settee, rubbing at a backside he could only hope hadn't been blistered. He spun back towards Humanitas, feeling his eyes narrow as the pieces came swiftly together. "You blessed the couch, didn't you?!"

Humanitas offered a perfectly lovely smile in return, his moustache twitching up towards his nose as he made a sign of the cross. Crowley was near sputtering his indignation, staring at the settee as though it were the piece of furniture itself what had betrayed him.

"You can't go and bless the couch! That's my couch, that's where I sit, that's where I _always_ sit!" Crowley attempted to touch the arm of the settee and leapt back with a pained yell, waving his now stinging, burning hand about in the air. _"AZIRAPHALE!"_

Aziraphale appeared from around the corner of the kitchenette, apparently having long since sorted out the shattered plate and moving on to other matters so as to keep himself busy. This included, but was not limited to, filling up the salt and pepper shakers, dusting inside of the cutlery divider and rotating all the spices so that their alphabetised labels now faced outwards. It wasn't presenting him much in the way of a challenge; for these were tasks that he did in fact attend to both routinely and without any of the usual sense of irony a normal human being might have ascribed to such banal chores.

"Why are you bellowing, dear?" He asked pleasantly, perhaps rather the more enjoying the difficulties Crowley was experiencing. Given the confidence with which he had approached the endeavour, it was impossible not to take some small amount of satisfaction in watching the demon attempt to all but ice skate uphill.

"He blessed the couch!" Crowley had descended to the point now of 'shrieking' which was neither a state nor pitch with which he ever wished to be in any way associated. "He blessed the couch and now I can't sit down! He knows that's my favourite spot, that's my couch!"

Aziraphale, doing his very best to keep both the smile from his face and the amusement from his voice, turned to the Virtue with the very best admonishing type look he was capable.

"Humanitas, we discussed this when last you visited, dear fellow. I do often entertain a guest of demonic extraction and it would be much appreciated if you could forego the blessing of any items he might be be required to use at some point during the evening. ...The toilet seat comes to mind."

Crowley gasped like a very average Shakespearean actor. "That's right, I'd forgotten about that, you dirty bastard! What is it with you and trying to set my arse on fire?!"

"I am sorry, I think I just derive an enormous amount of pleasure from watching you throw a tantrum. And the buttock alighting really is just a delightful bonus." Humanitas tapped a fingertip against the bridge of his nose. "There. Please."

Crowley cast a hesitant glance towards the settee before then slowly reaching out and making the smallest, infinitesimal glance of his finger against one of the cushions. When it did not burn him, he carefully set the palm of his hand down, to make doubly certain that all had returned to order. Satisfied that the blessing had been revoked, Crowley straightened up and gave a toss of his head what might have put an ornery horse to shame.

"You know what?" He strutted back over towards Humanitas, reached down and plucked the glass out of the Virtue's hand. "I think you've overstayed your welcome." He turned, swanned his way towards the kitchenette and snapped his fingers imperiously in Aziraphale's direction. "Be a love and show him the door, would you?"

Aziraphale wasn't altogether certain whether to be amused or annoyed with Crowley for the Orwellian reaction.

"Since when were you pronounced Lord and Lady of the manor, Crowley?" He asked. "He may leave whenever he is ready."

Humanitas eased himself up out of his seat with a chuckle and a grunt what made him sound every bit as old as the human he was emulating appeared to be . "It's quite all right, I had best be making tracks." He took Aziraphale's hand between his own, squeezed it firmly before then thumping his remaining palm stoutly against the angel's upper arm. "Thank you for the cocoa. Hope you don't mind, but I thought I might browse back over _The Mayor of Casterbridge._ " He lifted the leather flap what would hold his satchel closed and elevated into view the spine of the book he had placed within. "Can never go wrong with a good Thomas Hardy, am I right?"

"Of course. And thank you for returning the book. As well as the..." Aziraphale cast his eyes briefly skyward, scrunching his nose as he leaned in and lowered his voice conspiratorially. "... you know."

"You are very welcome." The Virtue whispered back, beaming as he took the angels hands between his own and lent a cheery slap to the back of his knuckles. "Enjoy it in good health. Though I dare say you do rather have your work cut out for you." His eyes twinkled as he tilted his head to where Crowley continued to glower importantly from the doorway of the kitchenette. "Bit of a bombshell, that one."

 _Rather the_ dramatic _bombshell,_ Aziraphale thought, doing everything within his power so as to keep from rolling his eyes as he walked Humanitas to the door and wished him a good night.

Upon his return to the study area, he found Crowley waiting for him, perched ostentatiously in the cushy study chair and subtly leveraging one half of his dressing gown aside, so as to show off a long, hairy leg.

"Well... think I'm ready to cash in on my reward now." He said, taking a sip from his scotch and gargling it in a not at all alluring manner.

Aziraphale scoffed as he gathered up Humanitas's mug and ferried it back towards the kitchenette.

"Cash in, please. It was like watching a man squeeze a stone expecting mud to come out."

"Blood _,_ Aziraphale. The saying is blood, not mud. And I got more than enough of the red sticky stuff from that guy." Crowley pulled a face, thinking back over what he had just said. "That... didn't come out right."

"I heard the whole conversation," Aziraphale said, rinsing the glass and the mug under the tap and giving each a quick wipe with his wash sponge. He heard Crowley drift in to lean against the door frame. "He gave nothing away."

"Yeah, but you weren't watching, were you, angel? Lot of conversation happens with the eyes, the face." Crowley made a gesture towards his own face as though cleaning off a window pane. "Learnt enough about that from you across the years. Not that you ever hid your feelings. Everything you feel is just right on up there like a ten story high billboard. READ ME!"

"Yes, yes, all that aside, what is it that you suppose you managed to glean from of all that?" Aziraphale placed the crockery into the dish rack and took Crowley gently by the hips, simply as a means to steer him out of the way. He was naturally forced to wiggle himself free as the demon made every attempt to latch on like a starving tic. "I mean, you can hardly say that you were subtle towards the end."

"That's because I had already gotten all the information I needed." Crowley looked every bit as smug as the cat who had snaggled the keys to the clotted cream factory. He strode across the room, hoisting himself up so as to perch upon the study desk. Feet naturally resting on the seat in which Aziraphale might otherwise have been intending to occupy. "I wanted him to go away thinking that I'd been left wanting. Had to go and act desperate and frustrated, or else he might have cottoned on that I'd figured something out." He tapped a finger against the side of his own head. "He's no dummy, Aziraphale. Moment we went into that back room, I put odds on him thinking we were gonna go and try and get something out of him. I just let him think that he'd not let anything slip."

"And he did?" Aziraphale asked, uncertain. It was true he hadn't actually been in the room to observe Crowley and Humanitas's interaction. And there was a great deal to be said for the value of reading between the lines. Or so he believed. Angels had never really been much good at that sort of thing. They were far more literal, face value beings.

"You know what they say about kindness. It so rarely stills in the face of encroaching cruelty. When I made that little toast about the end of the world, just here -" Crowley gestured to the centre of his brows, raising them slightly so as to form a peak between them. "- little wrinkles here, brows tucking in. Just a split second. But it was there." He took his hand away, continued making the very same expression. "What does this look like to you?"

"Like... ... sadness." Aziraphale said, unfortunately being far too acquainted with the expression. The ramifications of the expression itself seemed more than telling. "But of course... the Virtue of kindness is hardly going to be... sad that the world _didn't_ end..."

"Nope. He'd be glad, you would think. The aversion of the Apocalypse spared the world from a great deal of pain. It was a kindness. It should have pleased him." Crowley took a sip from his scotch, his expression relaxing somewhat, though remaining entirely serious. "Then of course I made a point of the world having many, many, many more years ahead of it now. That's when he did that thing with his brows. That's the key, Aziraphale. He didn't contest it, he didn't affirm it. Just that look."

"Because of course he cannot lie." Aziraphale stated, taking off his reading glasses at long last and folding them between his hands. He would usually have done so before now, but the evening had been a particularly distracting one. "He's Kindness personified. He believes there to be no lie what ultimately serves as a kindness. Not even little white ones what might spare someone's feelings. Truth."

Crowley had of course already figured this out. He would never go so far as to say that he was the smarter of the two; simply that as a demon, he was more the often searching for things that Aziraphale, as both a kind hearted creature and an angel, would not think to look for. A courteous mindset could far too often limit your capacity to consider the vast majority of possibilities at another's disposal. And Crowley was just rude enough and demonic enough to step on the toes of these prospective possibilities.

The tarnished cogs what were the ancient workings of Aziraphale's mind had however taken to turning in directions they had so far failed to achieve. His eyes widened, as the ramifications of Crowley's carefully applied ministrations hardened into startling clarity.

"He believes that... the world does not in fact have so many years left."

"Seems so." Crowley said, tipping his glass up and draining the last few drops what lingered within the bedrock. It was a start, but a demon had a long roads ahead in the act of getting properly buzzed and he was barely at the point of packing his toothbrush, let alone loading his suitcase into the car.

He doubted whether there was, in fact, alcohol enough in the liquor cabinet to deal with this freshly deposited pile of preternatural bullshit. Enough alcohol in all of Soho for that matter.

"But that... that doesn't make sense." Aziraphale was frowning. Frowning and pacing. It was never a good sign. "Why then would Heaven and Hell be attempting to get in contact with us? We know that they want the war and care nothing for the collateral damage so far as earth is concerned."

"They want the _war,_ angel, that much is true." Crowley said, doing his part in maintaining an air of calm which he knew full well was imperative in bringing Aziraphale back level. There was a time and a place to indulge your own anxieties, but not when the love of your existence looked well on the verge of discorporating themselves by means of panic induced cardiovascular complications. "But what if the coming end of the world didn't in fact serve some purpose to them?"

"It still doesn't add up," Aziraphale insisted, though he did in fact look slightly calmer than he had moments earlier. The ease of Crowley's voice was yet another needed and guiding remonstration what worked well for someone like Aziraphale; who thrived for want of mental handrails. "Why would they bother trying to get in contact with us? What is the point of that? I mean, it's not as though we can do anything, is it?"

"Well, that's not altogether true." Said Crowley, with a rather the brazen smirk. "We did do something last time."

"Yes," Aziraphale agreed, though hardly at all feeding into the relish that Crowley appeared to be taking. "We mangled matters horribly."

"There you go then. Maybe they're hoping we can mangle things horribly this time too." Crowley lifted a finger from the side of his glass, leaving a sweaty fingerprint in its wake. "Say what you will, but us fucking things up seems to have an overarching impact on most other more important things."

And to this, Aziraphale did in fact laugh. For what more could he do, given the situation? Given the lunacy of their not so distant meddling, the ridiculousness that was the earth, the kingdoms and everything else thereof?

He could laugh because, in spite of the great unknown and all the terrible potential it might yet pose, there was Crowley, still with a smile, still with a clever thing to say and still every inch the one and only person he would care enough to trudge through the encroaching bog of absolute absurdity with.

What little could you do but laugh in the face of such things?

 _"I have seen the moment of my greatest flicker, and I have seen the eternal Footman hold my cot, and snicker."_ He cast toward Crowley a smile somewhat reticent in its foundations, perhaps for having indulged his own whimsical, oftentimes pretentious love of literature. "T.S Elliot."

"Dreary old bastard." Crowley more the typically responded and they both shared a laugh in it. As laughter invariably does however, it dwindled in its tidings and Aziraphale, left with a void what bristled with impertinent buzzing's, lent his hand to the glass of whiskey what Crowley had left behind and brought it to his lips.

He drank deep, for there was nothing to be gained from shallow delineations. The whiskey was sharp and smoky and he focused a few precious moments on this; letting it nullify the sharpened points of the nettles what were attempting to pierce the outer edges of his mind.

"What... what are we to do?" He said at last; two sips deeper below the surface and certain that nothing less than a hundred more might drown out the discord of his troubled thoughts. "If... another one is coming?"

Crowley shrugged. "Another end of the world? How the Heaven should I know? Armageddon only comes around once. Not like you get to go around again until you get it right."

They both chuckled at this; remembering Crowley's frustrated words during their first Apocalypse spent together. It was not that long ago, but seemed somehow an ages past. So much had happened in just a few short weeks alone.

This was perhaps the saddest thought. To feel as though the doorways to their world had at long last swung open, gifting them a glimpse of the endless, fantastical probabilities at their fingertips; only to have them then slam shut in their faces and for twine to be wrapped about the handles.

It was a beginning... A beginning already overshadowed by the looming wings of the End. And it was a terribly unfair thing. As were so many the things what were the workings of the world.

"Oh... oh this is ridiculous." Aziraphale said, already far the more fed up with his thoughts then he could properly deal with. "I don't even know what to say."

"Don't say anything." Crowley said. He set his glass down upon the study desk, eased himself back onto his feet and approached Aziraphale. With a snap of his fingers, he sent the angels drink spiralling through the air like an itinerant UFO under the guidance of an inebriated extra-terrestrial, whereupon it eventually docked itself upon a suitable shelf somewhere within the room. "End of the world's not coming about in the next six minutes and even if it was, I can't think of a better way to spend it -" He put his hands to each of Aziraphale's shoulders, steering him backwards so that he was all but forced onto the settee. Crowley flowed on like water, sectioning his legs to either side of Aziraphale's waist and cupping the angels face between his palms. "-then right here in your arms."

"Well, I suppose there's no arguing with _that."_ The angel said, giving a fond, progressively contented murmur as Crowley's lips plied their trade across his cheeks, his temples and the lines of his jaw. _Those kisses, what were sweet and selfish and could now, for the first time, be enjoyed without pause for pain._ "You _are_ a wily old serpent, aren't you?"

"Just shut up and take this stupid bow-tie off."

**~X~**

* * *


	43. Or, where Aziraphale and Crowley slip into something more comfortable.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was little to be done for it. Needs must when the devil drives, as Aziraphale had said earlier. If not for the exchange, he and Aziraphale would most certainly have been destroyed. It was a risk neither of them had been willing to take; regardless of any awkwardness experienced on either side.
> 
> And it was, of course, a risk still the very much present. Their preternatural powers might very well be quite as compromised as they were in fact treating them. This placed the agencies of Heaven and Hell indisputably in the position of control. Aziraphale and Crowley could not, under any circumstances, permit them to believe this.
> 
> They had to believe that Aziraphale and Crowley had transcended their true nature. That they were creatures what had evolved and adopted bilateral amplitudes. It was their last card to play; their truest, greatest and only line of defence against powers inarguably superior to their own modestly marshalled capabilities...

**~X~**

* * *

**~Saturday - 27th of April, 5:05pm~**   
_**London Soho...** _

Humanitas felt as though he had done a very kind thing.

He had done many a kind thing, in his time. That was his nature, after all. Precious little to do when kindness itself was the breadth of depth of your business.

He was genuinely fond of the angel and the demon. He would have liked to have thought that in what time they had left, they were able to be together in whatever form they chose. Without the constraints what had been placed upon them by their historical institutions.

Humanitas whistled as he crossed the street, getting out of the way of a red double decker bus at the very last moment. He barely noticed that his corporeal body had been in any way under threat, such a fine mood that he was in.

He ought to give Invidia a call. See if she would like for him to pick something up for dinner.

The only positive of the current contract; the amount of time that they were now permitted to spend together.

It would not last long, but they would certainly enjoy what time they had.

Humanitas was just reaching into his bag to take out his mobile phone, when he almost ran directly into two people as they careered around the corner.

"Oh, I do apologize. I wasn't watching where I was goi-" He paused, his moustache twitching up to follow the line of his smile as he recognized the faces staring back at him. "Well, hello there, Luxuria. How very small London seems to be!" He reached out and shook hands with the man at her side. "And Avaritia! I had no idea you had arrived!"

"Just got in this morning." Avaritia said. He looked nervous and glanced towards Luxuria as though hoping she might do the talking on his behalf.

"I... met him at the airport." She said, having taken up the hint. She gestured vaguely down along the sidewalk. "Thought he might be lonely, waiting for darling Caritas to get in, so thought I'd get the old sadsack out for a drink."

"What a kind sentiment." Humanitas said, approvingly. Luxuria glanced down the road from where the Virtue had more the likely wandered. She recognized one of the shops on the crossroad as one he had frequented in the past.

"Checking up on your friend, the angel?" She asked, making a subtle point in reminding the Virtue to be careful with whom he spoke.

Humanitas, for his money, realized he needed to in fact be very cautious in just how much information he made the Vices privy. Certainly, he could not lie, but he did not wish to put either Aziraphale or Crowley in danger. If the rest of the Contingency team were made aware that the earth bound agents were no longer in the employ of Heaven or Hell, they would deem that as befitting of the Exception clause what existed within the bonds of the contract.

Humanitas was satisfied that neither Aziraphale nor Crowley had any personal desire to cause trouble; in spite of their already having interfered with the coming of one Apocalypse already. But he knew that none of this would matter to the rest of the team. They would argue that there was little point in leaving a potential risk unattended and head right on out to discorporate the pair on the spot.

Humanitas would not risk that. He liked his little angel and demon and would sooner drop a dumbell on his own thumb, than risk seeing the likes of such innocent creatures come to harm.

"Oh yes. Still every bit the same as ever." Humanitas said, smiling quite as warmly as he ever did. It may have been a lie, for quite a bit had changed where Aziraphale was concerned, but he said it in such a way as to indicate that nothing about the angel's character had changed. It was the only way he would have been able to say it, otherwise. "I doubt we're likely to have any trouble from him."

"And what about the earth bound demonic agent?" Avaritia asked, glancing along at each side of the street, as though expecting to see the aforementioned installation strolling about with his horns out for all to see.

"Oh, no. No, no, he's a _frightfully_ lazy thing." Humanitas chuckled, distracted then by his mobile phone ringing from somewhere deep in the bowels of his bag. He gave silent thanks to Invidia for her timing. "Sorry. Would love to catch up, but I imagine that's Invidia wondering where I am. You know how she gets."

"Nothing lesser to be expected from Envy herself." Luxuria tittered, reaching up onto the tips of her toes to plant a kiss against Humanitas's cheek. "Have a lovely night, darling."

"Yes, yes. Be seeing you soon." Humanitas stepped around the corner, bringing the phone up to his ear. "Hello, my dear. No, no. Just catching up with an old friend... yes, someone you know..."

Luxuria and Avaritia waited until the booming voice had gotten itself lost in the noise of the surrounding streets before permitting themselves to relax.

"Do you think he bought it?" Avaritia asked, turning his head from side to side so as to work out some of the cracks in his spine.

"Think he was too busy worrying about getting his own dick wet to worry about whatever you might be doing with yours." Luxuria smiled suggestively, before turning her attention back down the street towards the bookshop. She twisted her full lips off to the side. "Don't you think he seemed a bit cagey about his catch up with the angel?"

"You know what a soft touch he is for the sub-species," Avaritia said. "He'd as much prefer to keep them out of it, where possible."

"It's for that reason precisely why I wouldn't be trusting him." Luxuria tapped one of her long nails against her cheek, thoughtfully. She had a sneaking suspicion that something else was very much afoot that night. And for the once, it had nothing whatsoever to do with her.

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 5:34pm~** _   
_**Crowley's flat - Mayfair... ** _

A few days prior to the scheduled meeting between Aziraphale, Crowley and the representatives of Heaven and Hell, the angels and demons of each institution had gotten together and come up with a plan.

This plan, was centred around the need to provide some assurances as to their safety, when dealing with the unpredictable likes of the dishonourably discharged agents.

Aziraphale had shown to have been immune to Hellfire. And Crowley to Holy Water. This was not a tolerance what was in any way shared by their historic kin.

Which put the pair at a significant advantage.

Whatever was to come about as a result of the meeting, none of them could say. But it would also prove useful in providing a distraction; keeping both Crowley and Aziraphale away from their respective domiciles, so that they might be searched for any dangerous items what might have been in their possession.

Each angel was to be paired with a demon; this would ensure that at any point in time at least one of the coupling would be immune to whatever defences the ex-agents had conjured within their homes.

Hastur remembered his last visit to Crowley's flat all too well. He had spent the first five minutes, using Sandalphon as a celestial shield, jumping back with frightened shrieks whenever the Seraphim kicked a door in. He kept expecting another bucket of Holy water to drop on them and naturally preferred for the angel to be the recipient. He was only likely to end up being cold and miserable, rather than a burning, writhing sack of flesh upon the floor.

It so far had transpired that Crowley had not in fact booby trapped his home in any way shape or form. And if he was in possession of any remaining Holy water, it was nowhere to be found; Sandalphon having long since broken into the safe and finding nothing in there except a photo album containing pictures of a dark skinned woman that neither of them recognized.

Ten minutes into the search and Sandalphon and Hastur had found themselves coming to a natural stall in the proceedings. They stood, side by side in the hallway, staring uncertainly at a statue what was set atop a stone display stand against the far wall. Hastur was nursing a drink what he had appropriated from one of Crowley's many liquor cabinets.

"... is this supposed to be an angel and a demon?" He asked, after more than a few silent minutes spent on the two of them trying to figure it out on their own.

Sandalphon sniffed. "... I... would assume so."

Hastur tilted his head slightly to the side. Like a dog what had heard the word 'walk' and knew full well that it meant something pleasant was in store.

"What are they meant to be doing...?"

"Wrestling. ...I guess."

They both continued to stare it at; equally as unconvinced as the other.

"It... it doesn't look much like wrestling to me." Hastur asserted, thinking it rather the more resembled what he had seen a pair of wild badgers doing in the graveyard on the night he had been required to hand over the anti-Christ to Crowley. He'd felt a bit odd about having observed the display so closely, but he had been under the genuine misconception that the animals had been fighting and was anticipating seeing blood at some point or another. He was in desperate need of entertainment by that point. Lurking could only take you so far, after all.

"It really... doesn't..." Sandalphon had to agree. As an enforcer in the Heaven based militia, he could honestly say that if the statured figures really were wrestling, they were doing so in an extremely unorthodox and impractical fashion. He rather felt it would have been improper to have been wearing such skimpy garments as well. What were they intended to be? A Grecian Angel and Demon?

They continued to stare at the statue a few moments longer. Much as he had done that night in the graveyard, Hastur got to feeling creepy and disturbed in relatively short order.

"Why are we still looking at it?!"

"I don't know!" Sandalphon broke away, stepping in through the bedroom door. It was very dark inside, Crowley having left the blinds drawn. He went over and whipped them back, letting some of the remaining afternoon light in. "Well, if anything it only proves what I already suspected. That Crowley of yours is nothing but a pervert."

"Don't insult me by saying 'that Crowley of yours'; he's not _mine._ " Hastur shuddered at the thought, following Sandalphon into the room and moving as quickly as he could out from under the doorway. "If anything he's the exclusive property of that paltry angel of yours. Who, I might add, is far the more preferable company to you any day of the week."

Sandalphon, who was lifting the mattress so as to check underneath it, hardly looked the least concerned by the assessment. "Believe me, you are welcome to the little turncoat. Makes no difference to me."

Hastur chuckled, picking up a photograph off of the bedside table. It was a picture of Crowley and of the little 'turncoat' himself.

"If I didn't know any better, I would say you were jealous."

Sandalphon snorted at the very suggestion of such a thing. "It'll be a cold day in Hell when I find cause to be jealous of some substandard Principality."

"Some substandard Principality with eyes like jewels and who smells of powdered cinnamon and freshly baked bread." Hastur made a point of turning the photograph about, pointing at Aziraphale's face as though this sold his point entirely. "You just smell of bitter disconcertment. And those powdery peppermints little old ladies seem partial to for whatever the reason. You know. The ones what clack annoyingly against their dentures while they wait in line at the pharmacy."

"This coming from the demon who smells like flatulence in a bagful of fish!" The seraphim snapped back, yanking open the door leading into the ensuite and stepping inside.

Hastur looked very offended. "I washed before I came here! If anything I smell of tea tree and goats milk soap." Lord Beelzebub had actually insisted that he scrub himself down, if only to have preserved some manner of peace with their angelic counterparts, but he still believed he deserved points for abiding.

"Well, I admit that you _are_ somewhat less odorous than usual." Sandalphon begrudgingly acknowledged. "Might have done something to improve the state of your wig, however."

"And you might have done something for the state of your manners, but who's taking score?"

The Seraphim could feel himself developing the tell-tale strains of an encroaching headache. It was happening far the more often lately and one of the many reasons as to why he felt such relief when it came time to shed his corporeal body.

"Listen, we have little time to search this place and I don't see you doing much in the way of helping." He sighed, praying to the Lord above for patience as he gestured to the demons glove encased, dirt coated hand. "What is that?"

"It's a drink." Hastur stated, thinking it obvious. He was drinking it, after all. Which set it far the worlds apart from any other object he might in fact have been holding onto. Like a concha shell or a boogie board.

Sandalphon rephrased the question. "Why are you drinking?"

"Why not?" The demon shrugged. "It was here, I was thirsty and more to the point it belongs to Crowley. Least the little runt could do, given all the shit he's put us through lately." He took another sip from the glass and swilled it about his mouth with great relish. Things stolen from putrescent twerps like Crowley, always tasted sweetest.

"Wonderful." Sandalphon remarked with a long, maudlin sounding sigh. "Now I'll be forced to deal with a drunk demon. As if the day couldn't get any better..."

"Takes a great deal more'n this to get me drunk, Seraphim. Though here's hoping." He waggled the glass in a manner what he knew full well, by virtue of being a demon, to be tempting. "Why don't you have one yourself? Really takes the edge off."

"I don't care for the edges to come off. I like the edges. I prefer that they remain right where they are."

"Why?" Hastur asked, genuinely curious. It seemed an odd way as to go about living your life. Content by being in a constant and off putting state of perpetual thorniness. He wasn't much better himself, he knew, but he was a demon. It was considered more a point of pride to be unapproachable and objectionable.

"Keeps me on point." Sandalphon replied, sounding every bit as practiced as a military man could be. Hastur raised a brow, acceding to this statement.

"Well, no one could deny that you're definitely pointy. Question is, do you ever stop being pointy?"

"What good comes from not being... pointy?" The Seraphim asked. He could feel his headache getting worse by the minute.

"Don't you ever just switch off? Take some time out from being..." Hastur waved a hand vaguely in Sandalphon's direction. "...well, you?"

"Are you suggesting there's something wrong with my being me?" Sandalphon's eyes narrowed in a way what indicated imminent physical harm might have very well been approaching the demon with all the single mindedness of a bullet train. It was the sort of statement what would, in Heaven, have resulted in the person to whom Sandalphon was speaking to back up so fast they might have tripped over themselves.

But this was not Heaven. And Hastur was a demon what was not easily nor readily intimidated. He was a heavy weight of Hell in his own right; capable of standing toe-to-toe with most anyone and anything. And he clearly gave less than two fucks about Sandalphon's feelings, which was very much a novelty for a Seraphim who was accustomed to being feared.

"Obviously. Yer uptight. I haven't even been around you that long and you already make me feel bloody exhausted." The demon grumbled as he took another sip from his drink. "It's like your muscles are all tensed up, all the feckin time."

"They're human muscles," Sandalphon said, stepping out from the ensuite; having checked all the drawers on the sink and vanity. He pulled the door shut behind him. "They'll keep."

"I'm not just talking about your human muscles, dickhead. Your spiritual muscles, whatever you wanna call 'em." Hastur gestured around his own raggedy looking head as some evidence of the spiritual aura.

"I'm not interested in entertaining philosophical discussions with a demon when there is work what needs doing." The Seraphim stated, going through the drawers now of the bedside table. He felt an nigh irresistible urge to rip each of them out and shake the contents all over the floor. It would have given him enormous satisfaction and perhaps alleviated some of the ever increasing annoyance what was working its way through him like a treatment resistant super virus.

"If it makes you feel any better, not that I give a donkey's left testicle for makin' ye feel better, I get what it's like."

Sandalphon sighed, glancing up impatiently from the drawer in which his hand was currently buried. "What _what_ is like?"

"Getting called on to do the hard yards, be the muscle, pull the punches. I mean, just because you're good at something doesn't mean that that's all there is to ye." The demon actually looked a little bitter, which was something the angel had certainly never before seen in his time. "Back in Heaven, I was one of them architects. Rolling hills, as far as the eye can see?" He tapped the glass against his chest. "My idea. Some of those other daft beggars wanted the world to be completely flat! I said 'How boring would it be if everything you looked upon looked the same? Throw something in there to break it up, you know? Add some wrinkles to the earth. Give it some character, you know?'"

"...I do like hills." Sandalphon admitted. He had always been a big fan of wide open, clean cut scenery. Hills, mountains, streams and the like. There was something very... freeing about gazing out over a landscape which roiled and rolled. Green and fresh and clipped. Seeing it stretch on into the seemingly forever _nothingness._

"What's not to like?" Hastur asked rhetorically. "Except for climbing them. Hard on the hamstrings. But when you get to the top, you get a damned fine view." He shrugged, sat himself down heavily upon the bed. "Wouldn't expect some military badmin to get it. You ol' jack's were always too chuff to roll on in and stomp out whatever it was we were workin' on..."

"Only those projects what branched outside of Celestial creationism regulations." Sandalphon said, wondering why it had come across quite as defensively as it had. It was hardly as though he felt any reticent guilt on the matter. "You architects were always too experimental for your own good. Creation is a tool of the Lord's, not of her subjects."

"You gonna keep on defendin' her? Even now?" Hastur turned and gave the Seraphim a long look; one that the angel went to great strains to avoid returning." She hasn't got your back, jackboot. Never did."

"I imagine that this is all simply a-"

"A misunderstandin'?" The demon scoffed. "Yeah. You keep telling yourself that."

Silence fell between the two once more. Sandalphon pursed his lips together, tilting his head back towards the ceiling. He had never done it before, but he felt suddenly as though he might in fact weep.

There was little point in attempting to denounce the demons words. For he was in fact losing faith.

Ever the more by the moment.

He would not have been sneaking about in the company of a demon, if he had still had some trust in God's overarching plan.

That was the rub.

"...Where did you say you found that?" He asked, gesturing to the glass in the demons hands.

Hastur heaved himself up off of the bed. "I'll show you."

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 5:46pm~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London SoHo ** _

"You all ready for tonight?"

Aziraphale straightened his bow tie and checked his reflection in the bedroom credenza. His face was still a little flushed from the shower he'd taken and he had a small bruise on his neck which Crowley had insisted on bestowing whilst they had been 'occupied' on the settee.

"Yes, I managed to accrue..." He cleared his throat, uncertain precisely as to why he was exercising subtly but somehow feeling that it was nonetheless required. "- what I _needed_ to accrue. Any luck on your end?"

"Managed to whip something up. Should do the trick. More to the point," The bathroom light switched off and Crowley swaggered on out through the open doorway, placing a hand on his hip and striking what he must have supposed to have been a 'sexy' pose. "Do _these_ do the trick?"

Crowley was wearing a long sleeved black shirt, tucked in, with the top few buttons (naturally) undone. He had snakeskin boots on and a pair of black, skinny leg leather trousers, which were quite obviously the considered to be _piece de resistance_ of the entire ensemble. They sat a little higher on the waist than usual but apart from this, Aziraphale could barely discern much difference to his standard attire.

"Oh, new trousers?" He asked nonetheless, taking up his bottle of cologne and dabbing some onto each pulse point in his wrist and up around his neck. He flinched a little as the alcohol came into contact with the mark Crowley had made. Damn the devil and his sharp little teeth.

"Yup."

"They're very nice."

"Thought you might appreciate them." Crowley turned slowly as though on a dais and Aziraphale could suddenly appreciate the difference in the cut of the trousers. The way that the shirt accentuated the slight indenture of Crowley's waist, further flattering and enunciating the curve of his bottom. The tight leather was clingy and the rear pockets were even designed in such a way so as to pay tribute to the shape of his buttocks. "Since, you know..." Crowley glanced over his shoulder with a knowing smirk. "-you like high waisted things and all."

It seemed he had not forgotten the effect that the high waisted trousers he had worn to Gretchen's funeral had on Aziraphale. And the angel could not deny that the demon cut a particularly striking figure. A figure he would rather have liked to get his hands on, if time permitted.

"My compliments." He said instead, smiling as Crowley swivelled back around, looking altogether very pleased with himself. "No jacket tonight?"

The demon pulled a face. "Have you _been_ outside today, angel? Weather's up in the late twenties. Can't remember the last time we had a spring this hot."

"Last year comes to mind." Aziraphale remarked, turning his head from left to right with a sigh. The collar of his shirt simply did not do enough in conveying from sight that mark upon his neck. "It is rather warm, isn't it?" He added, taking up the book from his bedside table and using it to fan his face.

"Maybe that's just you appreciating how smart I look in these pants." Crowley suggested, slinking his way over to Aziraphale and threading his hands in around his waist from behind. "Or remembering those six magical barb free minutes we spent on the couch earlier, hmm?"

He placed a kiss to the back of Aziraphale's neck; one beneath the hairline, closely followed by another what graced the valley behind the angel's ear. An angel who was currently mustering every remaining iota of self-control left available to him, so as to keep from turning about and instilling himself more the deeply within Crowley's enticing hold.

Indeed, those moments they had shared on the settee (which most certainly did not amount to six minutes so much as ten) had been glorious. It had been the first time where they had been intimate, where Aziraphale had not been derailed by celestial inhibitors and was able to properly relax into and enjoy the sensations he was experiencing.

They had kissed a very long while. Aziraphale had gotten himself far the better acquainted with the outline of Crowley's body; caressing his palms tenderly over the plains of the demons back, cupping and stroking his thighs with the bridge of each thumb. Touching his chest, his shoulders, his flat stomach. Savouring the pressure of his lips, the deep, intimate passage of Crowley's tongue as it crossed over to touch against his own. To taste and to flutter and to sup.

Aziraphale remembered how Crowley pressed all the more tightly in against him; cupping the back and side of his head in response to the deepening of their kiss. His legs remained fast to either side of Aziraphale's waist and when he moved, it left the angel with no doubt as to just how greatly the kiss was affecting them both.

That delicious, unequivocal sensation... the heat of their mutual desire grazing together; gifting quite as much as receiving. The soft moan what Crowley had made at the feel of it; so exquisitely temperate and yet equally verdant in his undeniable want for more. It was a sound what near rent Aziraphale undone quite as readily as the knot in his bow tie and he could not help but to imagine that plaintive entreaty uttered in enduring, lust fuelled succession.

The way in which Crowley tilted his head back, exposing the long length of his neck... How his bottom lip dropped open and his breath jarred and stuttered over itself, as though fallen prey to some biologically observed manner of stage fright. The heat what radiated from his eyes; what might have looked to have been sleepy, if their being narrowed wasn't entirely as a result of his deep feelings of utter, irrepressible arousal.

And then he had gone and bitten Aziraphale on the neck and that had been quite enough to bring the angel smashing smartly back down into reality.

A reality in which they had then only precious few minutes in which to shower and get ready.

"Both are no doubt a contributory factor." Aziraphale said agreeably, smiling as he placed his hands atop Crowley's and gave each a gentle pat. "Still, there's no reason for you to have to change your attire just to suit me, dear. You should dress how you want to dress."

"Yeah, I know, but I like doing things to please you. Occasionally." Crowley left a parting squeeze about Aziraphale's midsection before dropping down to perch upon the bed. "And, after I find that copy of the Kama Sutra, I'll have about one-hundred different other means of pleasing you."

"Sixty-four _kama-kalas_ , which pertain predominantly to acts complimentary to that of love making. There are, in fact, only eighteen sexual positions." Aziraphale took a small amount of pleasure at the look of astonishment reflected on Crowley's face within the mirror.

"And how do you know that?"

Aziraphale gave a tug to each side of his vest so as to properly alleviate it of the wrinkles that wove their way through it.

"My dear, I've read near every book that has ever been published. How do you suppose I wouldn't know that?"

"Still... the _kama sutra_..." The demon smiled, reaching out to slide the palms of his hands about the contours of Aziraphale's hips as he turned to face him. "And here you were claiming not to be an old sauce-pot."

"Well, I wasn't back in the sixties." Aziraphale said, reaching out so as to soothe some perhaps purposefully wayward strands of hair from Crowley's part. "And if being well-read makes me a, how you say, 'sauce-pot' than a sauce-pot be I."

"You continue to surprise me, sir." Crowley murmured, leaning forwards so as to rest his chin against Aziraphale's sternum. He stared up at him, eyes wide and admiring; like a pup who adored their owner simply for their returning home each and every day after work. "Never stop."

Aziraphale was still not used to Crowley dropping his guard like this. It was an expression what was very much akin to when the demon would surrender to his anxieties but was far the softer still than what the angel was accustomed. It was extraordinarily disabling; the vulnerability. That palpitation of purest love lain bare.

Too many years spent in which Crowley had felt the need, or felt it appropriate rather, to maintain that fastidious reptile like air of breezy independence. To pretend, if rather poorly, that the distance between them was one what suited him. When all he had ever truly wanted was to be closer.

So many millions of nights spent alone. So many years spent apart. So many ridiculous, stupid, foolish games they had played with one another. So much hurt they could have avoided if they had both been brave enough, if they had been trusting enough to have said what it was that they were feeling. What it was that they _wanted._

So much time that whilst not entirely wasted, was lesser still for all the more joy what might have otherwise filled it.

"I would say the same to you," Aziraphale murmured, the cords of his soul strumming soft, radiant notes of love. He took Crowley's face between his hands, felt his entire being flush with pleasure for the adoration what swept through him and placed a kiss atop the bridge of the demon's nose. "But your last surprise ended up biting us both in the proverbial derriere, if you recall."

Crowley frowned and stuck his tongue out the corner of his mouth, blowing a short, curt raspberry. It was still raw, the memory of his foray into the brave new world of 'DIY intimate area waxing'. A memory what could not however hold a candle to the very tender condition of his still recuperating under-snatch.

"I _do_ recall, and if _you_ recall, only one of us had a lived experience of painful derriere so I would appreciate you not-" He lent his hand sharply to the cheek of Aziraphale's arse,"-bringing it up again."

"You can appreciate all you like, but it's never going to happen." Aziraphale chortled, giving a stout slap to the side of the demon's face as punishment before easing out of his grip and turning back once more towards the mirror. He tittered softly to himself as he adjusted his bow tie for the umpteenth time. "It's perhaps one of the funniest things I have ever seen. And mind you, I have six thousand years of material from which to choose."

"Ha-ha _._ Laugh it up all you like, angel but keep in mind that in a few short minutes it's going to be you having to deal with all the discomfort of the residual bruising that waxing strip left me with."

"Yes." Aziraphale remarked, looking over his shoulder at Crowley and wrinkling his nose in anticipation of the discomfort he was soon to experience. "And those pants, whilst undoubtedly pleasing to the eye, are rather the more uncomfortable to wear. And here I was so kind as to put on a linen shirt for you. You couldn't have picked something that breathed?"

Crowley grinned, lifting one of his legs as high as it would go and turning it from side to side. "And deny the world the pleasure of seeing these pins and this arse in anything but the finest skin clinging leather? I think not."

"You are a nightmare." Aziraphale said, smiling nonetheless fondly as he turned back to Crowley and clapped his hands together. He felt more than a touch nervous, which should have been evident, given all the fussing he was doing. "All right. Are you ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be." The demon said, swinging himself up off of the bed and tugging his belt that rather unnecessary enth degree higher. He paused a moment, worrying at his lower lip with his teeth. "You know, this'll be the first time we've switched bodies since we've become..." He offered Aziraphale a pointed look, inviting him to catch on. "-you know..."

"Intimate?" The angel rounded off. He wasn't altogether certain why he had made a question of it. His thoughts and anxieties were clearly running concurrent.

"You nervous?" Crowley asked. He was nervous. Changing forms had always seemed from the get go an extraordinarily intimate thing. They were basically slipping into one another's skins and parading it about, whilst doing their utmost to play the part accordingly.

Crowley rather fancied the thought of Aziraphale being inside of him. But there was a certain categorical difference to Aziraphale being _in_ his pants as opposed to _wearing_ his pants.

Though this was not the first time they had performed the exchange, Crowley could not help but wonder whether the executing of it now, might inadvertently fracture some of the newfound mystery they were since discovering in one another. He had already gone to the bathroom four times in the past hour, wanting to ensure beyond all reasonable doubt that Aziraphale would not be required to do so on his behalf. Being a demon, he could very well have used magic to put the bodily requirements on hold but he figured that would have been an unacceptable and wasteful expenditure of powers that may or may not have been on the way out.

There was nothing worse, he imagined, than having to use the toilet in someone else's body. The first time he had occupied Aziraphale's, he had been so terrified at the prospect of needing to void, that he had not in fact eaten or drunk anything all day. When Aziraphale had bought him an ice-cream, he had nursed it out of politeness's sake but had no intention of even taking so much as a perfunctory lick of the thing. It had been almost a relief when the forces of Heaven and Hell had finally turned up to tarry them off.

Showering Aziraphale's body had been bad enough. He'd needed to do it and had tried to be courteous and professional about it, but this was still the body of someone that he loved and someone who he might one day, wish to share physical intimacies with. He hadn't wanted any of the rich piquancy of the unknown to be spoiled for him. Crowley wanted to discover Aziraphale's body the way a lover ought to; by way of ripping his clothes off with his teeth like a feral raccoon hunting for a savoury scroll at the bottom of a skip bin. The best means to ensure that no inch of tacky tartan survived unscathed, of course.

There was little to be done for it. _Needs must when the devil drives,_ as Aziraphale had said. If not for the exchange, they would have both been destroyed. It was a risk neither of them had been willing to take; regardless of any awkwardness experienced on either side.

And it was, of course, a risk still the very much present. Their preternatural powers might very well be as compromised as they were in fact treating them. This placed the agencies of Heaven and Hell indisputably in the position of control. Aziraphale and Crowley could not, under any circumstance, permit them to believe this.

They had to believe that Aziraphale and Crowley had transcended their true nature. That they were creatures what had evolved and adopted bilateral amplitudes. It was their last card to play; their truest, greatest and only line of defence against powers inarguably superior to their own.

The change was needed. Whatever discomfort it might provoke was secondary.

They had seen the end results what Heaven and Hell had deemed suited for them. There was no other option.

"Only about feigning comfort in those pants." Aziraphale teased, meaning to ease Crowley's obvious tension somewhat. "Otherwise, no."

"You don't have your celestial failsafe's, though,” Crowley said, his shoulders hiking up towards his ears so that he looked all too much like a gnarly raven perched on a telephone wire, looking for its next piece of garbage to snarfle. "What if you're overcome by a bout of insatiable lust and you find yourself consumed by the urge to start rubbing your hands all over my arse while we're out in public?"

Aziraphale gave Crowley a long, withering look; the sort which said to pull up short on his stupidity before it railroaded him clear into a crash barrier.

"I'm sure it won't come to that."

"Didn't stop you on the couch ten minutes ago..." The demon said ever so slyly under his breath. He did however manage a smile as Aziraphale smacked a hand against the wall of his chest; frowning reproachfully.

"Yes, all right, do calm yourself. Everything will be just fine." He took a moment to do up a button on Crowley's shirt, rather feeling it his right, given that it was he who was about to occupy the body. Crowley of course, naturally undid it the second Aziraphale had taken his hands away. "We practiced emulating one another extensively before we did this the last time. I'm quite certain we should encounter no more in the ways of difficulty this go around too."

"If you're sure..."

"I am sure. Now, let's get a wiggle on. We need to try and fit in dinner first and we're already losing daylight." He held out his hand to Crowley, who stared at it as though Aziraphale had just attempted to pass him a tin of smoked oysters or something equally as absurd. "What's wrong?"

Crowley pinched his lips back from his teeth and tilted his head from side to side like a metronome. A façade what presented itself as the owner being wholesomely uncertain. "Ehhh... Just seems a bit impersonal, you know? A handshake." He said, both dolefully and sarcastically. A tone what prompted Aziraphale to self-consciously curl his fingers back in upon themselves and retract his hand so as to then rest it upon the buttons of his waistcoat. "Been a lot more familiar with each other lately than last time. Really want to devolve things back to the impartiality of such a pedestrian gesture as a handshake?"

"Well, what else would you suggest?" Aziraphale asked, rather wishing Crowley would stop reverting to that mocking tone of voice whenever he said 'handshake'. Many the rather marvellous things had come about from their exchanging of a handshake in the past. It was hardly what he would consider to be a 'pedestrian' gesture.

Crowley, however, had other gestures what he clearly found to be more meaningful than the time honoured commerce what was the clasping together of palms and fingers. Handshakes were an expression of honour, a salute to established statutes of trust, a signal of respect and most importantly, it was the founding of a promise. A promise you made to one another; a contract of which you had every intention of carrying out to the utmost of your capabilities. Not dissimilar to the vows what the humans might exchange in marriage, really.

It lacked nothing in the means of intimacy, so far as what it represented. A lovely gesture, what still permitted a certain, respectable degree of distance to remain between both parties.

Crowley had no time for distance. Not anymore. This wasn't the wall of Eden. This wasn't Shakespeare's Globe Theatre. It wasn't even eleven years ago, with him perched on the settee with a hairstyle some decades out of fashion, weaving the cleverest of the words he had ever thought himself capable, so as to convince Aziraphale of matters the angel ought really not to have taken so much the talking around to.

They were not friends anymore. Not singularly. They were lovers now. And lovers did not approach one another in an emotionally constipated, prim and proper austerity what might otherwise be aspired to by members of the British Royal family.

They had other avenues of exchange available to them. And they were much more fun then slapping a pair of sweaty palms together.

Crowley took his lower lip between his teeth, something he had observed Aziraphale taking some interest in lately and slid his hands slowly over the angel's shoulders. He felt the broadness of them, pressed his palms down so as to take stock of the quiet strength what slumbered in the rhomboids (a word he had picked up from watching medical dramas).

He leant in, placing a kiss softly against Aziraphale's already slightly parted mouth. Taking his upper lip between the pillars of his own and drawing on it; glancing his tongue against the ridges of his teeth. It was a kiss what was intended to make a point and so he didn't linger with it, though he would very much have been in favour of doing so and eased back, looking into the angels' eyes. Quietly pleased to see them half-lidded under the weight of bridling pleasure.

"... Oh." Aziraphale said, sliding his hands around so as to cup to each side of Crowley's waist. He drew him in closer, so that the lines of their bodies pressed together. "You think... it will work?" He asked, a little breathlessly. Crowley enjoyed this. This obvious concession of desire; this heady, helpless intonation of surrender. To hear it from an angel, to feel the wanting, eager push of his body against his own... there was nothing in all the known worlds what could be more satisfying than this.

Well... some things, more the likely. But they didn't have time for those just then.

"Course it'll work." Crowley said, his own voice as equally heavy with longing. "Not much different to kissing, really. Bit of give and a bit of take. Just..." He held up a cautionary finger. "Don't try and rush like you did last time."

"Yes, I know."

"You pushed in too quickly, I wasn't even half-way across the threshold. Felt like my head was about to explode. You have to slow down, give me a chance to get there too."

"I apologize. Very selfish of me." Said Aziraphale, proving just how selfish he was by taking Crowley by the back of the neck and drawing him down into another kiss. A kiss wherein their very souls felt flush with one another, the way in which clothing coagulates together whilst stirring within the bowels of a washing machine.

There was a sliding, a brushing, a sense of somehow occupying the same space at precisely the same moment. It was as though any miasma of stars was set to exploding somewhere inside of their very souls; perhaps much the less than a second long, in which Crowley and Aziraphale were, at once, looking from behind the very same eyes into which they were at the same time gazing.

Somehow present, somehow occupying the very same place, at the very same time.

"My darling..." Aziraphale whispered from between both sets of lips. Both hands setting themselves to the curve of each chin. "Could this moment last forever?"

Crowley could not bear the thought of moving. It seemed a moment, much like the provinence of sentient life, which was an unforeseeable, unprecedented fluke of universal coincidences. That tiny, incremental snifter what might be considered, even amongst preternatural beings such as themselves, a miracle.

"God willing..." The demon said, through both their lips and smiled. In that moment, he could care less for the technicalities of it. That they were somehow one and both at the exact same moment. How their souls had come together like a jigsaw puzzle, to make a whole of what had, until now, been floating disparate pieces.

 _If making love was anything like this,_ he thought, _I would never want it to end._

* * *

**~X~**


	44. Or, in which there is a meeting.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Well... might I propose, as the humans would say, a toast." He said, raising the glass, which still had a noticeable lipstick print adhered to the rim. "To mending bridges."
> 
> "We're not here in the interest of 'mending bridges', Gabriel." Aziraphale said coolly, plucking up another piece of banoffee pie and shoving it between his teeth so forcefully, he just about splintered the tines of the fork.
> 
> "Mending bridges is something you do after a minor disagreement." Crowley added, picking up his drink and sipping from it. He stuck his pinkie finger up in the air as he did, for it was a very English thing to do and as such, very much in Aziraphale's wheelhouse. "Not a follow on from kidnappings and attempted, albeit hilariously ineffective, executions."
> 
> "That being said..." Aziraphale reached down and picked up the object he had set on the booth beside him and placed it, with no small amount of ceremony, upon the table. It was a small plastic gun, affixed with a tube what was approximately the same size as a beer can. "I'm sure you'll understand if we took some precautions..."

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 5:55pm~** _

_**London SoHo... ** _

"They're leaving."

Dagon set down her third beer so forcefully it sent a shudder throughout the Formica countertop. "Thank Satan! Could they have taken any longer?!"

"Let's go." Uriel said, proceeding to lurch herself out of her seat with all the grace of a drunken Scotsman who had caught wind that the cheque was on its way.

In contrast to this comparison, the archangel had made good and certain to settle their bill a half hour earlier, so as not to waste time that would otherwise be needed. She had also left a generous tip, which she surmised was the proper thing what an angel would be expected to do.

Dagon had, of course, reappropriated the tip before leaving, as this was quite naturally the demonic thing to have done. In short, it had all balanced out rather nicely.

Uriel had not caught wind of her demonic compatriots expected subterfuge. As was ever so typical of an angel, she had her blinkers firmly affixed to the sides of her corporeal head and attention focused with keyhole like intensity on the task at hand. The end result being, as you might expect, that it fell to the responsibility of the two demons shadowing her, to magically slam the brakes down on a car that was otherwise intent on turning the archangel into a messy hood ornament.

Angels, Dagon had long since discovered, were an unremorsefully airheaded bunch.

How Crowley had managed to keep his own alive for so long was anyone's guess.

"Strange." She commented, once they had all made their transition safely onto the adjacent footpath; a car left honking angrily in their wake. "From the information I gathered, I didn't think that the angel drove."

"What are you talking about?" Uriel asked, in a harried tone. She was eager to get off of the street and out from under potentially prying eyes.

"The motor vehicle belongs to Crowley." Dagon explained, bending over so as to adjust the strap of one of her heels. Ignoring an obnoxious sounding whistle what erupted from a passing car window. "Very proud of the contraption, from what we gathered. But the angel just went and jumped in the drivers seat."

"So?"

"Seems out of character, is all."

"Well maybe the demon taught him how to drive. What does it matter?" Uriel was feeling more intensely under pressure by the moment. "Now, you're certain this scent repression spell will work?"

"It would want to. Crowley has a wicked sense of smell. Without it, he'll know we've been snooping around before he steps one foot on the curb." Dagon made a complicated flourish of the left hand, drawing up magic from down below. "Ought to do it. You." She snapped her fingers at the Disposable. "Keep an eye out. You see either of them, give the signal. Try and not stick out like dogs balls, yeah?"

"What should I do?" The Disposable asked, who really had about as much experience blending in to human society as a pangolin has with competitive downhill skiing.

"I don't know. Dance or something." Dagon said, rather sort of forgetting that Crowley was both very likely to take notice of a Disposable demon that he was historically well acquainted with and the fact that dancing on a street corner was far from your typical 'blending in' activity.

Nonetheless, the Disposable took the somewhat objectionable advice, dropped his hat onto the footpath in front of him and lurched into the sort of dance what might best be described as the foetal alcohol affected love child of a Scottish fling and a crack addicted Charleston. It was a curious display, one that was already drawing stares, most of them being of deepest, pathological concern, but it did have the somewhat unintended side effect of diverting people's attention away from the shop.

With a snap of her fingers, Uriel unlocked the door and slipped inside with Dagon pitching awkwardly along in her wake. The lights were all still on in the store, which might be considered a terrible waste of power. If, in fact, Aziraphale had ever dispensed so much as a dime to the power company.

"So far, so good." Uriel remarked, performing a quick, but concise magical scan of the store. To her surprise, Aziraphale had not laid down any spiritual traps, having come to the somewhat surprising conclusion that his demands to stay away would be intrinsically abided.

It was a naive assumption, though not at all atypical of the flighty Principality.

Dagon, in the midst of unbuckling her shoes, took a deep whiff of the air and felt every muscle in her corporeal body relax.

"Do you smell that?" She asked, a query what immediately rendered Uriel into a hunkered, anxiety riddled pose most usually associated with a person who has just realized that they had fallen headfirst into a gorilla enclosure.

"All I smell is old parchment, evil and the potent ferment of accumulative failures." She remarked, staring about at the crowded little shop with the pompous air of one who enjoys straight lines, perpendicular assortments and tidiness what bordered on obsessive compulsiveness. "Why? What do you smell?"

"Warmth. Cleanliness. Softness." The demon said, who had developed the punch drunk look of a person who has just been side swiped by a scooter in a busy street. She drifted from the doorway, trailing her fingertips over one of the cluttered displays, gleaning feelings of love from the covers of the books she came into contact with. "You can just... feel him in every nook and cranny of the place."

Uriel's face wrinkled up, her plainly wanting nothing at all to do with Aziraphale's 'nooks and crannies'.

"Pull yourself together. We're here on a mission. Look for anything that might pose as a risk. Holy water, cursed items, inverted crosses, whatever it is."

Uriel made a beeline for Aziraphale's desk, picking up items, looking them over before making certain to set them down in exactly the same place. Shaking statuettes, containers, opening drawers, even checking inside the refrigerator. Dagon did her part in floating about the room like a brain damaged feline on a catnip binge, draping herself atop tables, bookshelves and display counters alike. Soaking up the strange, yet extraordinarily comforting residual energy what the Principality had effectively imbued within every cherished object over the hundreds of years he had resided within the store.

Spending time with the angels was soothing. But it was a sensation what might be compared to a stopper full of medicine, in contrast to the great sprawling lake of peace what was exhumed by the angel Aziraphale.

It was more... open somehow. Accommodating.

That sense of somehow being in spite of the everything Dagon was... accepted.

And wholly absolved of blame.

* * *

**_~Saturday - 27th of April, 7:05pm~_ **   
**_Basement Sate - London Soho... _ **

"Crowley, would you please stop chewing on my thumbnail like that?"

"I can't help it." Crowley nonetheless eased the nail out from between his (Aziraphale's) front teeth and placed the hand back down upon the table. "I'm nervous."

"Would you just relax? One thing you need to understand about my body is that when it gets hot, it sweats. And when it gets nervous, it sweats. Given the current conditions, you are very much running the risk of having armpit stains the size of dinner plates." Aziraphale reached across, taking the hand what currently belonged to Crowley between his own and squeezing it. It felt a little strange, being that it was in fact his own hand. It was quite a bit plumper than Crowley's; the fingers not nearly so long and slender. "Take a breath. They're only five minutes late."

"'S'why I'm nervous. Give the old demon credit where credit's due but Beelzebub's always punctual. Hang over from the old daysss, that one. Fastidious, well organized, prompt. Never the sort to run late." Crowley brought his glass up to his lips, took a sip of scotch as he glanced about the room. "I don't like it." He leaned closer to Aziraphale. "You smell anything?"

"Too much of everything, really. How do you stand it? It's overwhelming." Aziraphale's eyes narrowed from behind the lenses of Crowley's glasses as he watched the demon polish off his drink and promptly fill the glass from the bottle on the table. "And would you _please_ slow down on the drinking? I don't want to go back into my body and find myself slobbering drunk!"

"You can sober yourself up. I need it. Try and steady my... our nerves a little."

"They will be here. And if they're not, we will get up and we will leave." Aziraphale delicately speared a portion of muscovado chocolate Banoffee onto the tines of his dessert fork and deposited it neatly between his lips.

He was feeling uncomfortable, though this was in no small part on account of how much he had eaten at dinner.

It was much less in fact, then what he might normally consume. He and Crowley had gone out to dine at the new sushi train he had been looking forward to attending. It did not take long before he came to very much regret their decision to change forms before heading to dinner.

Crowley ate only two small strips of salmon sashimi, devoting most of his run time instead to guzzling down an entire bottle of sake. Aziraphale, for the first time ever in his long existence, suddenly came to the understanding as to what humans meant when they said that their 'eyes were larger than their stomachs'. Because although he would have liked very much to have eaten more, Crowley's body did not possess the appetite nor the capacity to retain as much food as did his own. He had gotten full after only three meagre portions and had been forced to sit there, groaning disconcertedly at the feeling of Crowley's tight pants digging into his now bloated belly.

Aziraphale knew full well that when he popped back into his own skin however, he would be remorselessly famished. He had encouraged Crowley to eat more, but the demon was not in the least concerned with filling up the bodies belly, so much as tipping in as much alcohol as he could lay his fingers to. Aziraphale wondered whether he might have been worried about having to use the toilet at some point. Given the way that he was belting back the beverages, it was a matter of it coming about the sooner rather than later.

"You may wanna slow down there, yourself." Crowley suggested, gesturing at Aziraphale's loaded fork as it ascended once more to his lips. "Think those pants are uncomfortable now, just wait until you've got a full belly."

"Already taken care of." Aziraphale eased back from the table, indicating towards his midsection. "I undid your belt ten minutes ago."

Crowley glanced down. Sure enough, there sat the belt, unbuckled with the stylized straps draped to either side of Aziraphale's waist and the top button undone, with the zipper pulled down just enough so as to expose the band of his boxer shorts.

"Well," The demon mused, lifting one of Aziraphale's dark brows to form a purposefully poised and sedate expression. "If I knew that all it took was a few extra mouthfuls of cake, I might have tried it myself years ago."

He thought Aziraphale might scold him but the angel gave instead a soft and benevolent sounding chuckle at the remark. It seemed a somehow vain observation, but for the first time Crowley could actually understand why people might have praised him for his looks. With Aziraphale at the helm, the demons face possessed a sort of gentleness what Crowley was absolutely certain did not exist when he himself dwelt within the skin.

There was something more the... appealing about it. An approachability. Even with the dark glasses what kept his eyes shielded from human inspection, he looked warm and kind and, yes, rather handsome. Crowley never took stock of much things himself, but he had certainly noticed the amount of attention Aziraphale had garnered whilst inhabiting his body; especially from human women, whom he actually went to the effort of returning the smiles of.

Crowley would usually just sneer at them. An effective means of keeping them at bay so that he could enjoy the company of Aziraphale exclusively without being forced to tolerate a bunch of giggly, hormonal women whose biological clocks were ticking so loudly it was a wonder they did not drown out the conversation.

Most of the time it worked. Sometimes he needed to be rather the more direct, which usually resulted in his getting promptly chastised by an affronted Aziraphale.

He got the impression that the angel was starting to understand why in fact Crowley went to such lengths to appear standoffish. Aziraphale had already been forced to stop and chat with a group of women when he had gone up to the bar to get drinks. Of course the poor fool had no understanding as to just what terrible trap he had landed himself in and had been waylaid a good five or so minutes before Crowley had been forced to rescue both him and their drinks from the estrogen charged hostage situation.

The women had finally stopped glancing over when Crowley had gotten up and set himself firmly on the bench alongside Aziraphale, taking his hand up and placing a kiss to the back of it. He didn't much like kissing his own hand (perhaps others viewed him as handsome, but he didn't much fancy himself) but it had been a necessary evil so as to get some of the eyes off of them.

Or, so he thought. People obviously still considered them to be a rather curious looking couple. And that was simply taking their outward appearance into account. If they only knew just how different Aziraphale and Crowley were in fact, well, the staring would have been the least of their troubles.

Crowley tapped the backs of his fingers against Aziraphale's arm; blanching at how meagre the muscle felt. It made him a little self-conscious, for it was plain to him, having now occupied Aziraphale's body, just how very weak his own was by comparison.

He could both sense and feel it with every touch; just how much strength there was modestly poised within the angel's soft and unassuming form. A strength he obviously chose not to parade about, but kept tucked away, like a loaded gun slipped out of sight beneath a hanging shirttail.

And it was particularly embarrassing when he thought back to that one moment in the once-convent of the chattering order of St Beryl's when he had scruffed Aziraphale by the collar and slammed him up against the wall. Because it was ever the more obvious to him now, that Aziraphale had simply been humouring him and that Crowley perhaps had always lacked a great deal more power than he ever in fact realized.

Perhaps not where magical abilities were concerned. But when it came to physical presence, Aziraphale undoubtedly held the trump card. A card he hardly ever cared to play mind, but one he kept tucked neatly up his sleeve all the same. Would undoubtedly flourish with just as much delight as he did with any number of his silly little magic tricks, should the need arise.

A card of which he had already tossed into the ring, when he and Crowley had descended to hurling handfuls of mud and horse manure and other such maturities at one another in a rainy field not so many weeks removed...

"Hey. Give me my phone, would you?" Crowley asked, jerking his mind up out of the gutter into which it was rapidly descending.

Aziraphale had to ease up slightly out of his seat so as to slip the phone from one of Crowley's back pockets. Much to his credit, he had shown great restraint in so far as keeping his hands off of Crowley's arse was concerned. The demon had, however, caught him admiring it in one of the mirrors that was hanging by the bar and looking altogether far too pleased with himself for currently being in possession of said merchandise.

Even if said merchandise remained tender and bruised from ill-advised home waxing accidents.

"Why?" The angel asked as he settled back down and passed Crowley the phone.

"Need something to occupy myself. All this waiting is getting me good and niggly." Crowley keyed in the password and opened up the camera component, holding his arm out and gesturing for Aziraphale to move closer. "Come on. Scoot in."

Aziraphale sighed, setting down his fork and using a napkin to wipe the sides of his mouth. "Oh, really. Not another picture?"

"Yeah, another picture! Haven't had much on my feed lately! And at least it'll give me a good laugh when I look back on it. Knowing the in's and outs, as it were." Crowley raised his arm higher, creating a space for Aziraphale to squeeze in under it. He hesitated a moment, realizing that this was how Aziraphale must have felt whenever he took Crowley into his hold. And though Crowley's body was not exactly that of a small, frail man, the demon felt, perhaps as imparted by Aziraphale's own instincts, a need to somehow bundle him up, keep that lissom little creature warm and safe and protected.

The vestige of Aziraphale's assessments might have annoyed Crowley, if he was not in fact incredibly touched by them. They were feelings of love, rather than the angel possessing a poor opinion of him. He supposed the instincts would not be any the different if Crowley had in fact been a towering, muscle bound behemoth, with a back so broad he could have screened any of his power point presentations on it.

"Come on. Foist your glass." He instructed, holding his arm out as far as he could manage (much less than he was able to when in possession of his own body) and raising his own tumbler in demonstration.

"Fine." Aziraphale said, holding up his elaborate little cocktail and smiling, naturally, at the wrong section of the phone. Crowley set the timer to count down from ten and right as the flash went off, he turned his head and planted an affectionate kiss to the side of Aziraphale's face.

"Oh, you cheeky beggar." The angel scolded, though he hardly looking the least bit upset. Crowley laughed brazenly as he immediately started uploading the picture to every social media platform he had in his possession (which was, well... all of them) and affixing all sorts of hash tags both relevant and thinly associated. "Now people will think I can't keep my hands off of you."

"How is that not the truth?" Crowley said, with a smile and a wink. Aziraphale fancied such a cheeky look had never before found place of purchase upon his own features.

"Please. I can control myself." He tilted his head to the side, acquiescing. "...Most of the time."

Crowley smiled, resting his elbow on the table as he gazed at Aziraphale. "You know... looking at you now, I..." He reached out, brushing his fingers through the hair above 'Aziraphale's ear. It felt far the more different than it did when it was his own hands he was controlling. "I don't actually see myself. I mean... I know you can do a good impression of me but when you're just being yourself... I can still see you... you know?"

"The same goes for you." Aziraphale said. He was smiling too, but he did not reach out for Crowley in the same way. He seemed a little hesitant still. "You look like a... well a more grumpy version of me, perhaps but... I know full well that it is you behind those eyes. I can see it in your gestures." He indicated the way in which Crowley was leaning his weight against the table, the tell tale slackening of his posture. "Would recognize you a mile away, even if I hadn't known any better beforehand."

Crowley reached out, setting his hand atop Aziraphale's. Felt a rush of love and desire what seemed intrinsically just as much a part of the angels as it was his own. He leaned closer, sensing the soul what was currently shelved behind the body of which he usually inhabited and feeling that all the rest of it was very much immaterial.

That was Aziraphale in there. Aziraphale behind those eyes, within those hands.

Inside those lips.

Aziraphale, who was twisting those lips up now to form an ever so slight grimace. "Still not certain how comfortable I am with... kissing my... my-my-self..." He murmured, wondering in fact just why it was that Crowley seemed to find the act so irresistible. Certainly his body was not the _most_ unattractive on offer, but it was hardly in the same 'ball-park' (as the American's might say) as the demon's.

"Close your eyes." Crowley said, sliding his fingers down between those slender digits what were normally his own. He felt them curl and clutch in return and Aziraphale was closing his eyes and Crowley was doing the same.

Their lips came together. Their kiss was one what was both very different, and at the same time, entirely familiar.

Crowley felt his lips such as Aziraphale must have felt them and was pleased to find that it wasn't at all bad. He supposed he had a nice enough mouth. He preferred the feel of Aziraphale's, but that was only natural. Would be something of a pickle if he decided he enjoyed kissing himself more.

It was a strange thing, but with his eyes closed, Crowley was able to recognize Aziraphale completely, just by virtue of his kiss alone. It was the same technique, the same deliberate, almost possessive hunger. The way he would, ever so tentatively, grace the tip of Crowley's tongue with his own, before sliding it deeper inside.

Their bodies might have changed, but little else had done.

"Oh..." Came an uncomfortable sounding voice from beside the table. Aziraphale and Crowley broke from their kiss and looked up to see that Gabriel and Beelzebub had at long last deigned to present themselves. Gabriel was looking particularly perturbed and didn't seem to know where to direct his gaze. "Well... I mean I had my suspicions of course but to actually witness it in the flesh..."

Beelzebub jabbed their elbow into Gabriel's hip, not at all being subtle about it. It wasn't to anyone's benefit to start their conversation out on the wrong foot. And tensions were already, no doubt, exceedingly high.

"I mean... I suppose that what you do now is entirely your own business. However..." Gabriel closed his eyes and swallowed in that way people have when they're trying to be polite and not throw up at the same time. "...unsavoury that business may be."

Crowley could not help but feel nervous. Which was rather a natural side effect of being in the presence of a demon quite so powerful as Lord Beelzebub. A demon who could, under most circumstances, rip his physical body apart with just as much ease as one might otherwise take to clean grit out from underneath their fingernails.

Strange to think that they had once been close. Back in Heaven, that is. Raphael had been a brilliant, kind and protective overseer; one who truly seemed to respect and care about the wellbeing of their underlings.

It was precisely as to why so many of the architects had jumped barge to Lucifer's side. Out of loyalty to Raphael. The archangel who had always stood up for them.

Crowley could not afford to look nervous. He was playing the part of Aziraphale. And Aziraphale had shown, in the past few exchanges he'd shared with his begrudged ex-employers, to be especially stalwart in his demeanour. He needed to keep that up, otherwise it might raise suspicions.

It helped that Aziraphale maintained a hold of his hand; giving it a good, firm and supportive squeeze. Whatever happened, they had one another's backs. And that was ever so much the steel plate what Crowley felt was currently required in order to strengthen his habitually droopy spine.

"How are the testicles today, Gabriel?" Crowley, as Aziraphale asked, giving a straight edged, entirely wicked looking smile. "Descended yet?"

Gabriel shuffled awkwardly. "Yes." He replied, clearing his throat and straightening up. Obviously resentful of the reminder. "Thank you for asking."

"I, for one, could care less az to what the two of you chooze to do to occupy your free time," Beelzebub said, with their usual dead and flattened affect. And it was true; they did not seem at all bothered by having wandered up on their former charge locking tonsils with an ancient enemy. Which seemed a very mature response, Crowley conceded. "Given that there are far the more important matterz to discuss."

They waited for Gabriel to get the hint and pull out one of the chairs which faced the booth in which Crowley and Aziraphale were seated. Beelzebub lowered themselves down, tucked the chair in closer to the table and nodded towards Aziraphale.

"Demon Crowley."

Aziraphale, did rather the marvellous job in mimicking the routine jut of Crowley's lower lip. "Lord Beelzebub. Don't think I've ever seen you looking quite so tanned."

"Travelling for work." They replied, without so much as a flicker of a blistered eyelash. They turned instead and stared pointedly at Gabriel, who still couldn't seem to make up his mind as to whether he wanted to sit down or not. "Get uz a drink."

"Of course." The Archangel said, looking somewhat relieved for having a reason to delay his joining of the group. "That... monkey thing again?"

"Yes. Nothing for you. Glass of water, if need be."

Gabriel bowed his head, still very much in the proverbial doghouse regards his previous ill-advised foray into the world of alcohol. "Won't be a moment." He stepped backwards away from the table before turning with a neat spin of his heel and heading towards the bar. Crowley, eyes wide at the spectacle, gave an impressed whistle.

"Someone's got an archangel wrapped around their little finger I see."

"I wouldn't go so far as to suggezt that." Beelzebub said, their expression characteristically unaffected. "Circumstances have forced us into one another's company. As you can imagine, that's hardly a comfortable arrangement for either party."

"Dredging up old memories." Crowley remarked, forgetting for a moment that he was in Aziraphale's body and it was not the sort of thing Aziraphale would have said. It was a little too cruel, a little too pointed. A little too familiar.

As an architect, Crowley had been granted a first row seat into the relationship what existed between Gabriel and Raphael. Gabriel had spent a great deal of his time in Heaven visiting his fellow archangel in the Studio space, where the architects and fellow developmentalists were stationed.

Theirs was, so far as anyone had been concerned, an incontestably deep and truest of loves. Raphael had clearly never been in any doubt as to Gabriel's feelings for them; enough so that when they chose to stand with Lucifer, they truly believed that Gabriel would not rally against them.

They knew Gabriel better than anyone.

Their mistake, indeed their hubris, was believing that Gabriel loved them far the more than he loved God.

And how quickly his great love could turn to disdain. How remorseless he could in fact be, in the face of the perceived betrayal.

It was a sore point for Lord Beelzebub, even in all the thousands of years that had passed since the time of the rebellion. It was a sore point in the way in which a blistering, septicaemia riddled laceration was a 'sore point' and taking jabs at such still tender wounds was just as advisable as dangling your dick through the bars of a lions cage.

It was not the sort of thing Aziraphale would do; aim for someone's belly like that. Beelzebub seemed to pick up on it too, because they gave Crowley a both cold and systematically curious look. Aziraphale shot his foot sideways, banging the snakeskin boot into Crowley's ankle hard enough to jar a nerve. A warning to remain in character.

They sat in awkward silence for some minutes, waiting for Gabriel to return with Beelzebub's drink. He eventually drifted back over with an apology, stating that the bar did not in fact make the sort of beverage that Lord Beelzebub had requested, so they had purchased something what he was told was 'very similar.'

He set the elaborate looking cocktail down in front of the demon's perpetually unimpressed expression before settling into his own seat with his glass of water.

"Well... might I propose, as the humans would say, a toast." He said, raising the glass, which still had a noticeable lipstick print adhered to the rim. "To mending bridges."

"We're not here in the interest of 'mending bridges', Gabriel." Aziraphale said coolly, plucking up another piece of banoffee pie and shoving it between his teeth so forcefully, he just about splintered the tines of the fork.

"Mending bridges is something you do after a minor disagreement." Crowley added, picking up his drink and sipping from it. He stuck his pinkie finger up in the air as he did, for it was a very English thing to do and as such, very much in Aziraphale's wheelhouse. "Not a follow on from kidnappings and attempted, albeit hilariously ineffective, executions."

"That being said..." Aziraphale reached down and picked up the object he had set on the booth beside him and placed it, with no small amount of ceremony, upon the table. It was a small plastic gun, affixed with a tube what was approximately the same size as a beer can. "I'm sure you'll understand if we took some precautions."

Beelzebub looked down at the gun, a cheap orange novelty you might purchase at any discount pound shop and turned their unimpressed gaze back towards Aziraphale with a shrug.

"What are you planning on doing?" They said, in a tone what might have been considered sarcastic if they had bothered with putting some manner of inflection into it. "Shooting uz?"

"Don't be ridiculous, where would I get an actual gun? It's a water pistol. Packed with just enough Holy Water to sear your face clean off of your skull." Aziraphale had visited a local church a number of times in the past week, taking small stoppers of water with each visit; not enough so he would be observed doing so. He had managed, after a series of successive trips, to accumulate just enough water so as to fill the chamber of the pistol he had purchased. Which was just enough with which to make a point.

"As you can see..." He held up his own/Crowley's hand and squirted water into the palm. "Zero effect on me. Point it at you though, and I fancy it can do a great deal more damage." He tilted his head, just enough so that his eyes could be seen from behind the glasses. Tried to ignore Crowley's fingers as they eased about his thigh and gave it a suggestive squeeze. "Do we understand each other?"

Beelzebub's features shifted for the first time that evening and they eyed off the water pistol with carefully marshalled, yet simultaneous troubled strains of anxiety. Even one squirt from that pathetic looking child's toys was more than enough to envisage serious, irreparable damage. The kind what was impossible to heal, the kind that if it did not kill you outright, you would be forced to live with forever. And the pain from Holy water wounds was known to be excruciating; such that you would more the likely prefer to just stick your head in the oven and get the pain of it over and done with.

"We do." Said the Lord of the Infernal regions. They were loathe to permit Crowley any opportunity with which to gain one leg up on them, but when it came to Holy water, it was far the wiser to simply suck it up and move on.

Gabriel for his part, looked genuinely offended at the not so blatantly disguised intimidation tactic. "There's really no need to come here with threats." He blustered, glaring down at the plastic water pistol as though considering evaporating its' plastic carapace on the spot. He must have supposed this a far too risky endeavour, because the device remained intact. "This is a meeting of good faith."

"Relax Gabriel, wouldn't want you thinking we'd gone and forgotten about _you_." Crowley said, smirking in a very self-satisfied manner as he picked up something from the seat beside him now and dropped it heavily onto the table before the archangel's contextually handsome, though currently glib and uncomprehending features.

"A book?"

"Not just any book. A copy of _Fifty Shades of Grey_ , to be exact. Cursed for extra measure, with the blood of a virgin as its spell source." It had been his own blood but he figured what could be better used to curse an object than the blood of a virgin demon? "I see anything, _hear_ anything I don't like... And I start reading excerpts." He picked up the book and allowed it to fall open in his hand; to where a bookmark had been earlier slotted into place. "I've marked some particularly scandalous sections and I won't hesitate to flick straight to them if you so much as breathe at us wrong."

Gabriel wore the look of a person who understood that they had been threatened, yet wasn't altogether certain as to _why_ they should in fact feel threatened. He stared at the book; the white pages stained in places from where blood had been liberally sprinkled about the interior sections and remembered that the human world was a place better understood by the likes of Aziraphale and Crowley. Agents who had spent the accumulative sum of the past six thousand years interring and marinating themselves within the symbolic melting pot that was the earth. If there was something within this particular... material object which the Principality considered to be of potential risk, then he was more the likely the one to know about it.

That being said, it simply would not do for the smug set of turn-coats to get off with thinking that they were effectively in control of the situation. Gabriel had never been one to go ahead and let anyone believe that they had managed to kick the legs out from underneath him. And that certainly was not about to start now.

"Let's all be reasonable here." He said, his voice firm. "Here the both of you are acting as though you are the innocent parties in the whole affair. You betrayed your respective realms. Fraternized with the enemy." He jabbed a hand out towards who he understood Aziraphale to be, eyes widening in evidence of the inarguable cheek of the situation. "You lied! Which, in your case demon, I can morally abate, given that it is nothing sort of your professional responsibilities, but as far as you are concerned, Aziraphale, it is nothing sort of reprehensible."

Both Aziraphale and Crowley looked entirely prepared to arm their respective 'weapons' and let fly in response to Gabriel's outburst but a curt smack of Beelzebub's hand to the table pulled the both of them up short. It also managed to startle Gabriel just enough that he managed to spill water down the front of his tailored turtle-neck.

"Debating the happenstancez of the past iz a pointless wazte of time and as we have precious little time of which to wazte I suggezt that we move on-" They snapped their fingers sharply offside of Gabriel's ear; a clear uncontested sign that he pull himself back into line. "-and dizcuss the matter at hand."

"This matter wouldn't have anything to do with the Vices and Virtues, would it?" Aziraphale suggested and knew that he had hit the nail square on the head. Gabriel and Beelzebub stared at him, both their features for once duplicate in their surprise.

"... how do you know about that?" Gabriel asked, taking a break from attempting to sponge water out of his top with a serviette what was quickly being reduced to bobbly shreds against the expensive material.

"Been doing this a long time." Aziraphale placed his fingers to the frame of the dark glasses and tapped them knowingly. "Eyes and ears on the ground, and all that."

"I received a visit from Humanitas. Just before we came to meet with you, in fact." Crowley said, taking rather intense delight at the continued visage of shock what was resonating from across the table. Having people on the back foot had always been his particular cup of sweet tea. "He didn't give much away, only that he was in town on 'contractual' work. Crowley here was _clever_ enough to figure out that whatever work he is here to do is not making him happy." He took another sip from his drink, smirking into his glass at the subtly unimpressed look Aziraphale directed at him from the corner of his eyes. "And that it may in fact pertain to another 'would-be' end of days."

"Is that... anywhere on the money?" Aziraphale added, seeming to be taking equal parts pleasure in the quiet distress what was emanating from their former employers. He'd never had opportunity much to do so in the past and he was finding the indulgence of it near about as delicious as the dessert upon his plate.

Gabriel and Beelzebub looked slowly at one another, having one of those silent conversations what was perhaps more meaningful than an entire spoken exchange. It was interesting, Crowley thought, for it was not dissimilar to what he and Aziraphale were able to do. Six thousand years apart and old habits still drifted to the surface like a corpse in the summer time.

"This is... this is awkward." Gabriel said and did in fact appear very the much uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that he went ahead and took a sip of his water, something Aziraphale had never before borne witness to. "We're not entirely at liberty to disclose information."

"Why not?"

"We're contractually bound." Beelzebub stated, pinching a bright aqua coloured piece of fairy floss from the side of their glass and slipping it between their lips. "By agreementz which were set in place long before the time of the Fall and which apply even in lieu of our damnation."

"The only people to whom it does not apply are expunged agents." Gabriel concluded, gesturing across the table at Aziraphale and Crowley. As though there were any doubts as to who he might otherwise have been referring.

Crowley set his drink down, turning the base about in a semi-circle what nearly ground the glass through the base of the table. He felt a strain setting up shop in the jaw what was currently on loan from Aziraphale and went to the extra effort of relaxing it as much as he was able. Overt demonstrations of anger were not the automatic go-to of a predominantly serene natured Principality. As much as the demon what was occupying the body of said Principality might have otherwise preferred.

"Let me try and get this as... straight as I am capable." He said, clearing his throat, straightening up and then, as an afterthought, scooting the dessert plate out form underneath Aziraphale's already readily poised fork and setting it up in front of himself. He took the fork as an afterthought, ignoring the angels indignant expression and cut into the side of the pie as though he had some true, irrepressible desire to partake of the sugary nonsense. "Mmmm. Scrum-diddly-umpcious." He fairly much oozed, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with a pinched portion of his so far as untouched serviette before setting it down with the sort of flagrant flourish of the wrist he thought every bit expected of Aziraphale. "Now, what was I saying? Oh, yes! So, there is something going on, something which involves the Vices and the Virtues and which may result in another would-be end times, something which you can't tell us anything about and yet wish to involve us in?"

"... something like that, yes." Gabriel said, somewhat the lamely. He was beginning to feel as though he and Beelzebub had not planned this out very well in advance.

"Well, this is shaping up to be a fun game of charades." Crowley said sarcastically, delicately placing a piece of the pie between his lips and making then the same noises Aziraphale usually made when the two of them were kissing. Aziraphale for his part, found this plainly offensive and slugged back from his drink with a gnarly grunt what no one could argue would have been out of place whence coming from Crowley.

"Why exactly have you asked to meet with us?" He asked, setting his glass back down and slumping down so far into his seat, that his face near about disappeared behind the table. Crowley was required to reach over so as to hoist him back up to a more reasonable 'slouching' height. "Assuming that what you are saying is true and we serve as an exception to the contractual litigations that bind you," He got a kick in the shin, Crowley clearly reminding him not to be so prim and wordy. "I can't see what use we'd be against the likes of the Vices and Virtues. We're no more competition to them than a gnat is competition to a Boeing 727."

"We understand that they're powerful, yes-" Beelzebub began, but Aziraphale cut them off.

"Unless you have seen them in action, Lord Beelzebub, you know shit." He felt very proud for swearing. He didn't much like doing it himself, but it seemed precisely the sort of thing that Crowley would have done. "Aziraphale and I have both, unfortunately, had that pleasure..."

* * *

**~X~**


	45. Or, in which we shake free the sands of time and statutes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> -a white circle of light; so bright that it flooded out what residual shadows might have continued to lurk beneath the avenues of tables and chairs alike. The snakes flinched back and Crawley and Aziraphale were forced to cover their eyes; the resonance so startling and blistering that it near about seared the flesh from their faces.
> 
> It lasted but a few, bare moments before gratefully fading; revealing in its place the true form of the Vice of Envy.
> 
> It was the first time in all their long years that Crawley and Aziraphale had witnessed such a thing; for the Vices and Virtues did not often revert to their true nature, not even when conducting liaison business within Heaven and Hell. Their human like forms were likely considered to be a more appropriate and congenial vessel by which to execute their business.
> 
> It was obvious now as to why, for there was nothing what might be considered nearly so terrifying as coming face to face with the true form of a Vice...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There is an absolutely exquisite Good Omens comic online called Prince of Omens which is focused primarily around the Ten Plagues and Aziraphale and Crowley's involvement with them. This chapter was not inspired by the artists beautiful work, but something I had planned on doing from the very outset of this story; as it pertains to the abilities and powers of the Vices and Virtues and seemed a natural go to; given the grandiosity of the Ten Plagues of Egypt.
> 
> I felt, that as a result of the Prince of Omen's popularity, that it would be difficult not to draw a comparison or, more the likely, assume I had taken inspiration from the artists work. I did in fact came across the Prince of Omen's a few months back, long after I had penned an outline for this scene.
> 
> Just wanted to put it out there, if in case there were any thoughts as to my taking inspiration from someone else's work. I assure you; I have far too much stuff in my own head to bother with cramming in anyone else's ideas.
> 
> That being said; I absolutely ADORE the artwork of Prince of Omen's and if for some crazy reason you haven't seen or heard of this piece yet, I strongly advise that you get on out into the Internet and give this incredible artist some extra love, because by bloody oath, they have earned it :) They are an exceptional talent, such an extraordinary artist and story teller. A triple threat what I can only marvel at! xxx ooo

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Cairo-Egypt - 1313, BCE~** _

_**Temple of the Divine Messengers** _

Aziraphale had never much enjoyed his time spent in Egypt.

It was too hot, for the one. Even whence taking shelter in the shade, which was where he seemed to be spending the vast majority of his time these days. His human form was in possession of unforgivingly pale skin; skin what would sear like an Atlantic salmon if exposed to direct sunlight for too long.

He wasn't like his counterpart. Crowley would likely have taken to Egypt like a duck to water. He seemed the sort who would most probably walk about naked, without an ounce of shame as to who might happen upon him in such a state. Getting every last inch of his human skin as brown as the next.

Aziraphale did however have some relief on that particular occasion. It was night-time and whilst still mercilessly hot, there was no sun under which he might find himself blistering, baking and popping and peeling.

He was visiting a temple, located on the near outskirts of Cairo. It was a temple what's name would be long forgotten to history, once its purpose in that time had been fulfilled. And as of 1313 BCE, its current purpose was in providing a roof under which certain individuals were to rally, reconnoitre and imbibe whatever undeserved 'sacrifices' had been made to their perceived privilege.

It was these very individuals with whom Aziraphale had come to speak.

Doing so was not easy. The temple had been designed so as to confuse and prohibit access to any personages who might take an interest in snooping, grave robbing or thoughtlessly worshipping at an inconvenient time of day. Hallways could meander, peter out into nothingness, or stretch out into a seemingly endless void. Sometimes the floor would simply open up, and drop these more unfortunate maunderer's into pits from which they might have been lucky to have one day stumbled out from. Blinking, uncomprehending and perhaps the five or six years older than they might have been upon entering the temple in the first instance.

The darkness within the halls was at once dry and saturating; steeping a hapless wanderer deep into the bowels of its belly, whilst drawing every last breath of air out from their lungs and leaving burning track marks in its wake. Aziraphale understood well that this was simply another magical deterrent and one of which he had no need to indulge, given that he did not in fact require oxygen.

He carried a torch at his side; his own magic keeping the stick of wood burning, long after the affixed oily rag had dwindled into nothingness. The light it emitted was much stronger and brighter than anything what a human being might have been capable of producing. It cut through the preternatural darkness of the gaping halls like a warm knife through butter, though provided little in the means of comfort in doing so.

The Principality fancied he had not felt himself so nervous since the days of the Garden.

"Hello?" He called, turning the torch from side to side and taking note of the myriads of what would come to be known as hieroglyphs detailed along the length of the walls. He had been able to read once, but had gotten a little rusty in more recent times. They were all terribly flagrant exaggerations, anyhow. A testament to would be Gods who, whilst incontestably grand in their celestial scope, were nothing quite so deserving of the mantle to which they had insisted the humans elevate them to. "I, um... I'm sorry to trouble you... but I was wondering if I might have a word?"

The air in front of Aziraphale dimpled in the centre; as though a stone had been dropped into a waiting valley of water. A voice resonated throughout the sandstone; sending spackles of dust fettering down so as to carpet the curly waves of the angels' hair.

 ** _"WHOM DARES DISTURB THE SOLACE OF THE ANCIENT ONES?"_** Boomed the voice, with the ever so much important air what might otherwise be found in either a Disney cartoon, or in the inaugural address of the currently installed President of the United States.

"Ah... That would be I... Aziraphale." The angel replied, wishing that his voice had not taken on that shameful little squeak it was so prone to indulging at the end of sentences. "The uh... the Principality?"

The darkness parted before him like a curtain composed entirely from shadow and Humanitas stepped suddenly into view; dressed in the contrarily modest attire of what might have been more suited to that of a street vendor. He appeared little different to how he did in more modern times; only that his hair was a few fingers lower on his forehead and his face contained lesser in the way of fine lines. He was far the less burdened by humanity by that stage and had many more years of worries and foibles to tuck away into each nook of his face; such as a little bird jabs nesting material into an otherwise perfectly good drainage pipe.

"Oh, well why didn't you just say so? Do come in, dear chap." He said and reached behind him to in fact part the darkness with his hand, as though it were in fact nothing less than a beaded curtain dropped down between the doorway of a seventies style kitchen.

Aziraphale stepped through and paused a moment so as to gape at what it was that he encountered beyond the veil. The room what was found by slipping between the edges of darkness was grand, luxurious and positively dripping with gold as though someone had taken a hose and liberally sprayed the entire area with molten layers of the stuff. There were water falls and bathing pools, the surfaces of which were emitting curls of vibrant coloured steam. There were palm trees, jewels and gifts a plenty and decadent looking day beds what would not even exist in this time for goodness knows how many centuries to come.

Only a modest cotillian was gathered within the inner sanctum on that occasion. Acedia, Temperentia, Invidia, Gula, Industria, Patientia and, of course, Humanitas himself. The others, Aziraphale reasoned, must have been out, attending to some manner of 'Godly' duties.

"We're drinking wine," The aforementioned Virtue advised, gesturing to one of the many generously proportioned jugs what was set about the interior of the room at an approximate distance of three square feet per receptacle. "Would you care for a cup?"

"Oh, uh. No, no thank you." Aziraphale politely declined, descending the last of the stairs and slipping the still burning touch into a trench in the wall. Truly, he would in fact have loved a cup of most _anything_ at that very moment, but preferring to keep what wits he had about him. He was already on edge and lowering his inhibitions was hardly the likely to help him articulate himself.

"You sure?" The Vice called Gula called, splayed across what looked to be a fainting lounge from the sixteen-hundreds. He was dressed from head to toe as what might have been deemed appropriate for an Egyptian prince; a style what was hardly suited to such a customarily rotund creature. "Tribute from the Pharaoh. Gotta love these Egyptian Royals. People starvin' in the street and they throw all their jewels and gold into open graves and the mouths of would be gods."

The Vice of Gluttony laughed brazenly, sucking more grapes into the pit of his mouth, so that the stem he was holding was left like a dead and wizened tree, what might be more traditionally seen overlooking a graveyard. Temperentia, his virtuous second half, simply sighed at the display, looking thoroughly exhausted by it all.

"How can we help you?" The one called Patientia asked; currently presenting as a ubiquitous being what could not be so readily distinguished as either male or female. Either or, one could not deny that they were positively exquisite so far as appearances went. "Principality of the Eastern Gate?"

Now that he was standing there, in the presence of these ageless and mysterious creatures, Aziraphale was both saddened and unsurprised to find that he did not in fact have the words. He _ought_ to have done. He had rehearsed them, painstakingly, for some hours in the small, sand flooded grotto in which he had currently installed himself but the application of practice so swiftly fell beneath the hammers blow of anxiety.

How could he, a mere, unimportant Principality, believe he had any sort of place in second guessing the agenda of the Lord God's immediate right hand agents? Beings what were to him, as a mangy mongoose is to an elegant gazelle?

"Well, I uh..." He took a moment to clear his throat. He was still an angel and that aspired to be his one true saving grace in this situation. The greater good, some deeper sense of morality... had to prevail. "I have come to make an appeal."

"Oh, this should be good." The one called Invidia chuckled appreciatively, jangling her jewel covered way over to drape herself upon the lounge by which Humanitas was now obligingly attending. "Appeal away, dear angel. Until thine divine heart be contented."

"Invidia, please." Humanitas demurred, setting his fingertips to the shoulder of his counterpart in a tender mark of reproach.

"What? He's charming." She said, sipping from the equally jewel beset cup within her hand and looked to Aziraphale with eyes that sparkled just as beautifully and every bit as coldly. "He's sort of like our soft, cuddly celestial mascot. The one who 'hurrah's' our humble efforts in Her absence."

"You mustn't mind her." Humanitas advised, his fingers now curling about the graceful arch of the Vice's angular neck. A neck that she purveyed just as much as a blithesome cat, expectant of its masters steadfast attentions. "She has a propensity to shelve her manners when it suits her. What is this appeal that you wish to make, dear fellow?"

Aziraphale took a moment to collaborate what thoughts he had been entertaining for some weeks already and realign them into some semblance of order. It really ought not to have been so difficult. Years spent on project reassignment and this was the sort of thing what happened. A military angel had no place in permitting themselves to get so disgracefully nervy.

"Well... scud about on the street is that these ah... these nine plagues you have, uh... orchestrated thus far-"

Gula sat up sharply in his seat; a feat what must have taken considerable effort, given the metric tonne of institutionalized blubber he had at his disposal. "Oh! What did you think about the rain of fire? Took a lot of work to pull that one together. Industria had to travel all the way to Greece! Hauling that big old hammer of hers all the way." He sank back into his seat with a chuckle. "Felt the blow all the way through the gallows of the earth! Girl has a good arm on her, I can say that much."

"Oh, it was... _very_ impressive." Aziraphale said, not lying. Impressive was a word what could have a positive and negative connation, after all. "Fire and thunder and hail all... whooshing down from the sky. Palm trees burning... quite a few people burning too..." He chuckled nervously, which was what he had taken to doing when he felt rather more overwhelmed than he could otherwise cope with. "Rather a commendable effort on your parts, I dare say."

The Vices all looked particularly pleased with Aziraphale's assessment. The Virtues, Humanitas in particular, could not and would not take any manner of delight in work what unfortunately necessitated the suffering of others. They stared off towards floors, walls and corners, effortlessly contrite and systematically resigned to their parts in orchestrating the entire savourless affair.

"What uh, does concern me however, is more the word of this supposed um... upcoming plague, as it were." Aziraphale continued, wrapping a loose thread from the part in his robe about his finger. He curled it, felt it tighten and dig into his flesh. "If plague really is the right word so as to be referring it."

"you angels really do like to dither, don't you...?" Acedia observed, who was otherwise occupied in playing a game of _Mehen_ on an exquisite looking board what was carved from what appeared to be pure ivory. Industria, about exquisitely as ornate in their attire as Gula (though pulling it off rather the more efficiently) sniffled ironically as they moved their lioness piece about the second coil of the boards carving; knocking aside a glass marble what had been previously placed within one of the indentures.

"Coming from the likes of you, my treasure?" She smirked, taking the marble and placing it with a small handful what was situated beside her bended knee.

"it should say a lot as to how _true_ it is, then..." The Vice of sloth went to the clearly maligned effort of waving a grubby hand at Aziraphale. "get to the point. _dilly-dally-shilly-shally.._."

"Very well." Aziraphale squared his shoulders, tucked down his nerves about as far into his celestial spirit as they could go and did his utmost to speak plain. Dragging this out was only likely to grate on nerves he could not afford to grate. "This final plague... the hand of God passing over Egypt and striking down every first born son..." He hesitated, as though hoping one of the gathering might jump up and correct him. When not a one failed to do so, he was forced to continue. "Well, I mean... Surely, that's... that's an error in translation? Or something."

Invidia straightened in her seat. A shadow seemed to suck the light out from every edge what had, until precious moments earlier, outlined the circumference of her earthly form. "An error in translation?" She asked, an edge of deliberate warning making their mark upon her words.

"All I mean to say is... perhaps you... misinterpreted God's actual instructions. I mean, such things happen. We're all guilty of it."

"We are not _._ " Temperentia said, and it was the first time since the Garden that Aziraphale had heard any of the Virtue's speak curtly. It was somehow more the sobering than the Vice's expectantly indulged irritation.

"Listen, pet. Unlike you angels, we are as much of the divine as she is of us." Industria explained, rolling one of the glass marbles about on her fingers. In the blink of an eye, it occupied now the channels of her opposing hand, though Aziraphale was quite certain he hadn't seen her so much as raise her palm from the stone floor. "We speak the language of which your kind have never before heard. There is no means by which we can-" She directed her gaze towards him; a gaze that not even the simplest of fools could have gotten wrong. "-' _misinterpret'_ her instructions."

"I... It, it wasn't my intention to offend-"

"And yet you did such a remarkable job of it." Patientia said, in a kind voice. But a voice what said, all too clearly, that he had well and truly overstepped his mark.

"But... surely this cannot be God's genuine will. ... Can it?" The angel persisted. He felt a far off flickering in his chest. An inability to reconcile yet another circumstance which to him seemed one too many for his to simply stand by and idly abide. "I mean, the Flood was enough-"

Gula slopped wine down the front of himself in his rush to interrupt. "Since when did a Principality draw the assumption that he is by any way the divine judge as to 'what is enough?' I think that is rather the Almighty's call. Not that of lesser angel's."

"These children are innocent." Aziraphale said and it was, by the far, the strongest, most steadfast statement he had made thus far. It was enough for the faces what were staring back at him, to still, if albeit temporarily. "Whatever perceived sins of this human Pharaoh are not incumbent upon the offspring of his subjects. Why should they and their families be punished for the transgressions of their leader? It's..." He struggled once more to find the words what could accurately convey his astonishment at the thing. "It's... senseless."

"Ours is not to wonder why, sweet principality." Patientia said. Their eyes, deep as limpid pools, hummed a soft cadence of commiseration. "Ours is only to obey. I think we all remember the price paid by those who saw fit not to heed that advice." She glanced back towards the entryway, at the sound of an ethereal curtain being pushed aside and the irreverent cacophony of cursing what followed it. They smiled. "Speak of the devil..."

Aziraphale didn't even have to look. He knew it was him. Of course it was him. Who else would it be? It seemed that no matter how far and wide he travelled in this world, he would be forever besieged by the shadow of an extravagant, mouthy demon, who always asked far too many questions. Particularly those of which a humble Principality felt rather the conflicted about answering in the first place.

"Okay... got a bone to pick with you lot." The demon said, sounding far the more annoyed than Aziraphale had ever in fact heard him. He must have only then taken notice of the angel's presence because he made a noise akin to astonished delight. "Well, hello there Aziraphale."

"Crawley." Aziraphale replied stiffly, still not looking at him. They had not been so intimately acquainted in those days, and whilst they did get along rather well, Aziraphale was still every inch a loyal envoy of the celestial realm and was hardly about to go about acting friendly in front of creatures what sat at the symbolic elbow of the Almighty.

"We've really got to stop meeting like this. People'll talk." Crawley was grinning and feeling a little hurt that Aziraphale was refusing to make eye contact with him. Sure they weren't bosom buddies, but they were still installed as crew mates upon the same ship, in so few words. Was a little professional congeniality too much to ask for?

Aziraphale was already off and running with his long since established, though far from perfected game of 'I don't know you'. "Meeting? W-what do you mean 'meeting'? We don't meet. That would imply we have run into each other the more than once and I can guarantee I have absolutely no desire to spend-" He had been slowly turning so as to face the demon in the outpouring of his unconvincing diatribe and just about fell backwards onto the floor for what he was confronted with. "- good Lord, what in _God's_ name has happened to your hair?!"

In all previous incarnations under which Aziraphale had known him, Crawley had always been in possession of long, curly locks of blood red hair. As he stood before him now, there was not but a follicle remaining upon the demon's head; which was as smooth (and as disconcertedly shiny) as a one of the marbles currently pinched between Industria's fingers.

He wore a black linen robe, tied high about his waist so that it rested just below what might have been considered pectoral muscles on a more developed human. His chest, in grand deference to the all the generations what followed, was as devoid of hair as was his head. There was a sash sectioned about the upper hem of the robe, bedecked with an impressive looking gold ornament in the shape of a serpents gaping maw.

He also wore sandals, fashioned from interwoven sections of papyrus and what curled up at the forefront in an uncanny resemblance of a sultans slippers.

"Not in _Her_ name, _my_ name and just how many _hem-netjer_ do you see walking around with a full head of hair?" Crawley said, his coal lined eyes pinched in what appeared to be pained irritation. Aziraphale noticed that he was elevating one of his ridiculous papyrus wrapped feet off of the floor like a dog with a sore paw. "Method subterfuge is one thing, but I never factored in just what this bloody sun does to a bald scalp."

"Ah, yes. Of course." Aziraphale concurred, thinking all the while to himself that Crawley did in fact have rather the oddly shaped head. It certainly looked a good deal better when covered up by a solid weave of hair.

"Besides, who are you to go pointing fingers? Look at the size of your belly! When I suggested you try an apple, I didn't mean go and try the whole bloody tree!" The demon shot back, as Aziraphale tucked his robes self-consciously about his admittedly ever the more expanding stomach. "Looks like earth cuisine suits you. Doesn't seem a particularly angelic thing, really. Stuffing your face like a Pharaoh's chicken burping over a rotting hippo carcass." He was apparently in a bad mood, because he felt the need somehow to continue driving the point home with ever increasing levels of malevolent fancy. "You ever feel guilty when you see those half starved waifs on the street, reaching out with their tiny, skeletal hands, grasping hold on the edges of your robes, begging for that last itty scrap of bread clutched in your pudgy, piggish little trotters?"

"Oh, shut up!" Aziraphale snapped, genuinely wounded that the demon, who had always until now, been disarmingly pleasant, would stoop so low as this. To not only make sport of the angel's weakness when it came to food (food that he might never have partaken of, if not for the allure presented to him by said demon) but for doing so in front of God's representatives on earth. Representatives who had, upon witnessing the angel's outburst, all collectively pursed their lips together and effaced a long, low and entirely childish sounding ' _Ooooh'._

Realizing that he had stepped clear beyond the border of what was expected of an angel, Aziraphale wrenched himself back under control.

"What I meant was... Please, be quiet." He directed a frown at Crawley; a frown which meant every bit as much as what it suggested. "You... foul demon."

"Since you asked so nicely." Crowley said, unconcerned. He hopped in a slow circle, taking in the room with his foot levitating above the ground like a seagull trying to coax a casual beachgoer out of their last handful of chips. "Nice digs. I had nice digs. 'Til a great flaming boulder decided to make itself at home in my dining room."

He hopped partway so as to face the Vices and Virtues; doing that sort of strained smile Aziraphale would come to recognize as his being entirely insincere in his manner, yet entirely genuine so far as being smarmy was concerned.

"As a sort of segue to that, guys, I get that we're all very busy occult people with various occult work of our own to be getting on with, so I'll cut right to the chase. All very amusing this ten plagues stuff, but that was before I woke up with frogs in my bed, locusts swimming in my wine and a boil in a place where a boil really has no business being." He adjusted the back of his robe at this, paying tribute to something troubling that was thankfully, out of sight of the naked eye. "Not to mention that the lights went out and I stubbed my toe trying to find a torch and I bent the nail all the way back and you just know it's going to grow in black and that's a fine look to be sporting when sandals are in season! So whatever fun you were having with all this celestial merrymaking, do me a favour and pull the pin on it now!"

He interspersed his demand with a loud series of claps; as though he had suddenly morphed into a school teacher what was trying to hush a collective of teenagers right before the bell sounded for the end of term. Such as in the case of said metaphorical teacher and students, the Vices and Virtues appeared hardly at all pressured by the entreaty.

"Would you like for me to take a look at that toe for you, old boy?" Humanitas did however ask, leaving Invidia's side and crossing the room towards where Crowley was poised upon the stairwell like a cranky faced flamingo.

"No point trying to heal it, it won't budge."

"A Virtue can heal any wound, dear fellow. Corporeal and spiritual." Humanitas was already kneeling on the stair just below where Crawley was huffily installed. He took the demons foot in hand, like an attentive mother and started to unwind the papyrus straps. "Won't take but a minute and then you can wear all the open toed sandals you please."

"What is that you're wearing?" Aziraphale asked, curiosity winning out over his desire to be discreet. He had seen Crawley in any number of guises throughout the years, but this attire seemed particularly extravagant.

He had certainly never seen so much of the old serpents skin on display before.

"Like I said; priest's robes." Crawley pinched an edge of the material, pulling it slightly to the side whilst he wobbled unsteadily about on the one foot. "You like 'em?"

"I thought Priest's were only supposed to wear white."

"Yeah well... you know me. Good at getting what I want and all that." A statement which seemed a sort of gross exaggeration, given that there were plenty of things Crawley desired which he had never succeeded at getting his coils about. Present company included. "Plus, you know, little demonic miracles work a wonder."

"And why are you wearing priest's robes?"

Crawley pulled the sort of face one most often resorts to when the person they are talking with was insisting on being very stupid. "Working as a priest, duh. One of Pharaoh's priests. _Sau_ , actually. Magical Practitioner. You know talk to snakes, divine the weather, minor prophecy here and there. No great shakes, really."

"As I fail to contain my surprise." Aziraphale remarked a little saltily. Crawley, already feeling ornery and exhausted did not much appreciate the tone. Bad enough to receive that sort of feedback from his superiors, but he would expect someone in the same boat might have had courtesy enough to keep their lips zipped.

"Hey, I don't see YOU doing anything interesting these days. Where are all your good deeds going? Into your expanding waistline?" He branched both hands out to either side of his own slender hips, almost toppling over as his balance of gravity shifted. Humanitas managed to tug him up by the ankle at the last moment. "Trying to make yourself large enough so that you serve as a source of shade for all the children who are starving because you're eating up all the food stuffs in Egypt?"

"Now that was uncalled for." Aziraphale murmured, placing his hands around the front of his belly as though this would detract attention from the girth of it. "Really, if you can't say something nice-"

"Then I wouldn't get anything said." The demon sighed, aware that he was being very childish and had no excuse for being so. Nor any past experience from which to draw, for that matter. "Sorry, don't mind me. Stubbed toes, you know... Nothing pisses a person off more. Well, that and jamming your fingers." A warm sensation eased itself outward through his toe and the black of the nail receded, leaving healthy looking pink in its place. He flexed the toes in towards the heel of his foot, pleased to find that the pain was now gone. "Cheers."

Humanitas waved the gratuity aside with a small smile, returning to his vigil beside Invidia's chair. Patientia, lowered themselves onto the stone floor nearby with such acute grace that it would have put a contemporary fan dancer to shame.

"I'm confused." They confessed, spreading out the delicate lavender gauze of their robes so that it surrounded their reclining form like a bridal train. "I would have thought that as a demon you would have been all for making human's lives as miserable as possible."

"Their lives, yeah, but I draw the line when it encroaches upon _my_ creature comforts." Crawley came stomping down the stairs to where Aziraphale was currently standing, pausing to hitch up the thick sash what kept his robes tied about his middle. The ornament affixed to it looked particularly heavy and far the more trouble than it was worth. "I currently have a skylight where I used to have a perfectly functional ceiling. No one likes being woken up to a huge hunk of flaming rock smashing through their commode. So, can we just agree to draw a discreet and finite veil over this whole ten plagues nonsense and be done with it?" He extended his hands in a congenial gesture and chuckled. "I mean, I'm working here, guys and I prefer to work in as much comfort as I can otherwise glean from a place where I'm forced to carve sand out of every known orifice every five minutes or so."

"That depends." Gula said, who had long since tired of going to the effort of sitting up whence addressing their eleventh hour guests. He slumped, slug like upon the fainting couch; fingers dabbing impotently at a plate of dates set teasingly upon a nearby side table. "Does your pharaoh plan on releasing the Israelites from under the yoke of slavery and permitting them to return to the lands of their founding fathers?"

"He does not." Crawley said and Aziraphale could only quietly marvel at the confidence in which the demon was conducting himself in this conversation. Compared to the angels nervous, tic riddled tittering's, Crawley had marched in with a metaphorical flaming sword. Spoken word, it seemed, was one of the few areas in which he was both composed and courageous.

"And why not?" Industria asked, eyes not so much as drifting from the board as Acedia typically took their time with the pondering of their next move.

"Because I advised him not to." Crawley replied, nudging Aziraphale in the side as though the two of them were in on joke together. "Takes the word of an old snake charmer seriously, that one."

"Why would you do such a thing?" The angel asked, understandably affronted. "You have seen first hand the terrible conditions under which the slaves must toil."

"Um, hello?" Crawley tapped his knuckle smartly to the top of Aziraphale's head. "Because God wants the slaves freed and last I checked I was employed by the side who thumbs their nose at fairly much the everything that God wants. The whole thwarting the path of right schtick and all that, angel. Do try and keep up, it's not that hard."

Temperentia, having apparently tired of watching Gula waving their hand about ridiculously, zipped a date into his gluttonous clutches with a flick of her index finger.

"Well, given that the Pharaoh is not prepared to abide by the will of the Almighty, we have no choice but to drive the nail home, so to speak." She said evenly, watching her secondary chow into the flesh of the date as though he had not in fact eaten only a few moments earlier.

Crawley tilted back his head, growling his irritation into the orchestral gallows of the stone ceiling. "Oh, come on! I've got a rock the size of Kilimanjaro sticking out of the roof of my chambers! How much more 'driving home' can you possibly do? Seems like this is one of them," He emulated the striking of an object with what might have been an invisible golf club. "-sledgehammer meets ...staple scenarios."

"They plan to kill the first born sons of every family in Egypt." Aziraphale said softly, tucking his hands into his sleeves and lowering his chin so that it rested almost flush against his chest.

The demon stared at him, blinking his wide, coal hemmed eyes before casting his gaze about at the Vices and Virtues. All whom either returned his look with indifference, or refused to meet it in the first place.

"...What... you're kidding?" He waited a moment longer to see whether in fact anyone might have jumped to correct him and when no amendment was on offer, turned back to Aziraphale with what the angel took to be an almost gleefully ironic expression. "So all that rainbow malarkey was, what? Just a spouting off of hot air?"

"The rainbow was a promise not to drown everybody again." Aziraphale gently, though rather uncomfortably, corrected.

Crawley could hardly have looked more the pleased than if he had stumbled upon an unclaimed treasure chest of aged wine. "Ah, bit of the old catch twenty-two. Won't drown you again. Nothing in the agreement about killing all your first born sons. Minor technicality." He grinned, made a knuckle of his hand and pretended to glance it off of Aziraphale's unappreciative chin. "Not bad. Not good either, mind..."

"Look, I'm not any happier about this than you-"

"Oh, when you've got a giant flaming rock perched square where you latrine used to be, angel, then you can talk to me about how 'happy' I supposedly am." Crawley said, tightening the knot in his sash with a somewhat more relaxed look on his face then when he had first stepped foot in the room. "Death of first born's doesn't exactly affect me in a direct capacity."

"But it's barbaric." Aziraphale wasn't at all sure why he had bothered with adding emphasis to the word in the first place. How could he expect a demon to care about the imposition of celestial savagery, when it was of no direct imposition to him?

"Says you." Crawley shot back, clearly deriving some malicious delight in calling Aziraphale out on what he considered to be nothing less than class A hypocritical horse shit. "The angel who was all too content to stand around and watch them blubber about in the drink like a sack of kittens that nobody wanted."

"I wasn't content, I simply had no say in the matter."

"Is that what you're doing now? Attempting to have some say in the matter?"

"Believe it or not, yes." The angel stated and it was enough to pull Crawley up short. The demon did in fact look slightly impressed; if the arching of his brows (also drawn on, Aziraphale observed) was anything to go by.

"Hmm. Well, look at that. Guess there's something to be said for personal growth after all." The demon looked a moment longer at him, some manner of considerations clearly running through his head before, with a shrug, he tugged his robe in about his legs and turned on his papyrus wreathed heels. "Well. You have fun with that."

"You're leaving?!" Aziraphale garbled, scuttling after him and almost falling sideways up the stairs as the demon mounted them.

"Course I'm leaving. What's the point in hanging around arguing the rub with this lot? Might as well go back to the palace and try and talk the rock into rolling itself out of my chambers." Crowley hiked the hem of his robes higher, giving off the impression of being somewhat maidenly as he ascended the stairwell. "Enjoy about the same level of success."

Aziraphale had never been one for bold declarations; either of a verbal or physical nature. He was far too well meaning and respectful to indulge such impulses. But matters were very different now. The lives of virtually thousands of innocent children hung in the balance and it was clear from his earlier observations, that he was not the one who was in possession of the skills what might be required to belay their subsequent deaths.

He darted ahead of Crawley, blocking his path and raised both hands in an appeal for him to stop.

"Can't you just... _try_ and talk with them?" He whispered, ignoring the injurious look the demon was giving him.

"And what makes you think _I_ would do any better than you?" The demon asked, tilting his head back and sighing. He was fond of Aziraphale and certainly enjoyed his company, but that was rooted firmly on the proviso that he was more the somewhat well rested when they ran into each other.

He'd had precious little sleep these past few months, working as a spiritual advisor to the Pharaoh. The nine plagues had particularly taken their toll on him, because the Pharaoh had wanted explanations that were not rooted primarily in the reality of his adopted son enacting miracles on God's behalf. And it was of course, to his _sao_ that he directed such questions.

It wasn't as though Moses was in possession of any magical abilities himself. All the spiritual happenstances had been conducted by the Vices and Virtues, who followed the Israelite around in some unassuming guise or another.

It was their powers what had enacted the likes of hail, locusts and water what turned to blood at the touch of a simple wooden rod. It was they who had split the sky with their unfathomable dominion and wrought down fire and lightening. They who had scorched the leaves from the crops, had diminished the flesh of the livestock until they were nothing but skin and bone and of little use besides serving as a rather sinewy breakfast for jackals and vultures.

Try explaining that to a Pharaoh, though. Try explaining that the Gods of which his people were currently worshipping, were those in fact who were perpetuating these acts of biological warfare on behalf of the one God whom he did not at all, believe in.

As a direct result of said Pharaoh's accelerating disappointment, Crawley had found himself the personal recipient of a few solid thrashes about the back from a wickedly designed rod carved from river reeds. It had cut him up pretty good.

He'd taken it, because he had been charged by Hell with playing the part of a compliant priest but that did not suggest that he was in any way okay with it.

His back still bore the evidence of his injuries. It was a further requirement, to ensure that the humans did not suspect him of being anything the more than what he appeared to be. Tensions were high and the last thing he needed was to be discorporated by a rabble of angry Egyptian attendants; some of whom were particularly skilled in the art of ripping out organs with steel hooks and binding bodies up good and tight in graveyard gauze.

Be a Heaven of a thing to try and explain to Head office.

Aziraphale fussed, casting a nervous look back towards the Vices and the Virtues, who continued to watch the pair as though they were nothing more concerning than a mildly entertaining puppet show.

"Well, because you're... you're good at this sort of thing-"

"I'm not _good_ at anything, angel." Crawley said pointedly, swishing the parts of his robe about as though simply enjoying the feeling of the breeze they created. Aziraphale noticed that his legs appeared to be just as brown and as hairless as the rest of him. Nice to see that earth's sun agreed with some people.

"You know what I mean! Just... please." Aziraphale was desperate. Desperate enough, in fact, to do something that he could not imagine he could ever have done in all his many years. Something with which Heaven would take furious exception if they were to discover it. "Call it a... a favour."

Just as he had expected, this caught Crawley's ear. "An angel asking a favour from a demon..." He tutted, clearly intrigued. "This day is just full of surprises..."

"Spare me your gloating, please. Just..." Aziraphale gestured urgently back towards the interior sanctum; to the spattering of would-be gods what continued staring dolefully up at the two of them as they squabbled. "Try."

Little did Aziraphale know, that this very moment was where the seed of future ideas had been planted in Crawley's cunning mind. The understanding that the unique position in which the two of them shared as earth based instalments could be exploited so as to convenience the both of them.

Aziraphale had always considered it to have been Crawley to have come up with the prospect of the Arrangement in later years. And he was correct, in so few words. But it was he in fact, what had given Crawley this very idea in the first place. By requesting _this;_ this first of what transpired to be many the more favours to follow.

That first extension, such as it was, of trust.

Crawley sighed again, just so as to let Aziraphale know what an enormous inconvenience he was being. "Yeah, all right. I'll give it a bash. Might be good for a laugh." He swanned back down the stairs, pretending his very best not to have noticed the adorably grateful look on the Principality's face and more so the feelings of pleasure it evoked in him personally.

He swished his way back up to the gathering, jutting out one of his hips and placing his hand astride it. Aziraphale, trailing along behind had to once more marvel at just how easily entitled the demon was. As though any room into which he walked should automatically have been pleased to receive him.

"Hey." He said, which was typically eloquent in how understated it was.

Humanitas beamed accommodatingly, as though Crawley had not in fact been present in the room the entire time.

"Hello again."

Now Crawley was at a bit of a loss. True, he wasn't down with the killing of kids, that sort of shit was just not his scene. More of a Hastur and Ligur bag of bones, really. But he also sincerely did not have much of a vested interest in raising a finger so as to impede upon it. After all, the sooner the Vices and Virtues wrapped up their contract and retreated back to retirement, the sooner he could pull the pin on his current instalment and swan off out of Egypt for a good long while. Though not before sticking his foot up the arses of a few well deserving Priests first.

But if there was one thing that Crawley prided himself on, (though he did in fact pride himself on any other number of equally admirable demonic traits) it was the ability to bullshit on the fly. Lack of a genuine investment in something was no reason as to not spin a good story around it.

And besides... to have an angelic favour in his back pocket... Well, back of his tunic, whatever.

When opportunity knocks...

"Look, um... that whole... killing of the First born thing... just thinking... why not give it a miss, eh?" He offered up his most charming, most ostentatiously shit-eating smile which usually served him so well when it came to the guiles of naive humans. "Go another round of boils and sores? Pretty sure you had the old boy at breaking point with that one. Another good lashing of the pus filled nasties and he'll be ferrying the slaves out himself on the back of his own chariot."

"We've already done boils and sores though..." Gula said, sounding every bit as though Crawley had intentionally swanned on in and taken a big steamy piss all over his parade.

"variety is the spice of life, so the saying goes..." Acedia added, finally deigning to make a move on the playing board. They knocked one of Industria's pieces aside and settled their own Lion shaped piece further within the coils of the snakes winding belly. "not 'copy/pasting plagues' is the spice of life..."

"Besides," Temperentia said, in her ever the more serene voice. "God demands the death of the first born next. Everything has its proper order, you know."

"But-"

"No ifs, no buts, little demon. We have our instructions." Industria waved a hand towards Crawley dismissively, already preoccupied with the next move she intended to make with the game. "Go on with you now."

Crawley pursed his lips, fighting back the burbling impulse to round off with something very rude. He could not stand that level of disdain; the being treated as though he were an impertinent child (though he had of course no idea how a child might in fact be treated but he felt this was a situation which would apply).

But hauling off at a collective of beings what could easily render him down to serviceable lunch meat did not at all seem to be in his best interests. It was fortunate in fact that Superbia was absent from proceedings, for he would have likely battered Crawley about the ears so violently by now that the demon would have been forced to extract his facial features out from the inside of his neck.

Crawley turned to Aziraphale with a shrug. "Well... I tried."

"You need to try harder than that!" Aziraphale insisted, annoyed. It seemed to him that most people would have put more effort into passing a bowel movement than Crawley had put into his conversation with the Vices and Virtues.

And it was true, Crawley knew. He'd taken a sort of half-arsed approach to the thing. But that was simply because he was tired and he was sore and he honestly could not be fucked with the much of anything at the moment. But Aziraphale's frustration actually sparked some untapped font of energy inside of the demon and he felt a then very true and earnest desire to at least, if not outright convince the Vices and Virtues of abandoning their plans, give his very best attempt in doing so.

"Okay... look." Crowley said, the last vestiges of warmth leaching from his tone and the yellow of his eyes branching out to encompass the borders of what had once been white. He knew he must have looked particularly demonic right then, which was precisely the effect he was going for. Faint heart never won fair angel, as they said. "I think I might have given you the wrong impression when I suggested that you _not_ kill the kids. What I actually meant was more along your lines of a... demand. As in don't kill the kids. Or else."

He might have kicked a chicken in an RPG, the reaction was so dramatic. Every head in the room turned on him as one, joints cracking in necks, brows genuflecting up into furrowed superfluous foreheads.

"Or else ...what? _"_ Industria asked, who did not appear frightened so much as deeply amused by the inadequately resourced nature of the threat.

Crawley stood there, with about as much animation is an Easter Island effigy, wondering just where the Heaven he was supposed to go from here. He hadn't meant to pop on out with the 'or else' but it just seemed a natural roll on from a explicitly stated demand. Now that he had arrived at this point, however, he wasn't at all sure what he was going to do.

Nonetheless, he attempted to stand tall, suitably intimidating and not at all like the sort of person what would limp into a room, whimpering and bitching about stubbing their toe in the dark.

"You will face the full wrath of my displeasure." He stated, using his very best 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' tone of voice, which usually got humans off of his case right smart. The 'full wrath of displeasure' line was something he had lifted from Hastur's repertoire; who was in fact far more experienced at dispensing a suitable 'what-for' than Crowley was. Mainly as a result of Hastur possessing an unparalleled appreciation for agony, internal organs and the screams what humans would emit when said internal organs were extracted before they had stopped breathing, but then that was a messy process and Crawley rather preferred to keep his clothes clean where possible.

Invidia, clearly thinking that Crawley was in fact the biggest gobshite she had ever met in her entire long existence, gave the demon a long withering look before returning her attention to her drink.

"I think we'll chance it."

A sticky wicket indeed. But Crawley could not back down. He had his pride, and indeed, more than a few tricks up his demonic sleeves with which to protect it.

"Very well." He snapped his fingers, drawing magical energy up from down below. "Don't say as you haven't been warned."

The chamber was filled suddenly with the sinister chorus of hissing. From all previously unoccupied corners, the spaces between stones and from the thin of the air itself, came the slithering of a hundred or more sand coloured snakes. Their eyes, some as black as the temple halls and others as yet brilliant a shade of yellow as Crawley's, were locked resolutely upon the Vices and the Virtues; whom they had formed an ill-tempered circle about. Some went so far in fact, as to raise the front portion of their sinuous bodies up off of the ground, flattening out their heads and distending the spotted hood about their necks. Their slender mouths parted, putting on display the venom filled fangs in their upper maws.

Aziraphale jumped, letting out a startled squeak as one of the creatures slithered directly between his feet, paying little mind to his robe which it simply pushed aside in its single minded mission to reach its compatriots in the centre of the room.

"I do say, just what are these charming little fellows?" Humanitas remarked, smiling fondly at the angry, hissing snake nearest him, as though it were every bit as adorable as a puppy with a bow on. It was a trend what would persist well and truly into the future, underpinning all his foreseeable interactions with a not often cuddly Crawley.

"These 'charming' little fellows are Egyptian asps. Cobra's, if you like." Crawley explained, wondering all the while if he was well and truly putting his foot in it. If any of this got back to Hell, he might as well just toss himself into a pit of these things and be done with it. "One of the most highly venomous snakes in the known world. It's venom contains neurotoxins and cytotoxins. One bite can inject up to 300mg of a lethal cocktail; destroying nerves and tissue, resulting in any other lovely additional complications. Take your pick; respiratory failure, necrosis, full-body convulsions, heart failure, organ failure, mild to severe faecal incontinence. Shall I go on?"

Aziraphale sincerely hoped that Crawley would not in fact continue adding to that list and had in fact mounted three of the steps to his rear, so as to keep well out of potential biting distance.

"I'll say it again," Crowley hissed, elevating one of his hands. The cobra's all raised their upper bodies as a collective, as though they were tied to each of the demon's fingers like obliging puppets. Their hissing was so loud now, that it nearly drowned out his next words. "Leave the kids _alone_."

The Vices and the Virtues stared at the surrounding throng of snakes in silence. Invidia, without so much as a change of expression, rose slowly from her seat and set her cup down on a nearby table. She ignored the snake nearest her, which jerked its head sideways and hissed its displeasure of her not at all sudden movements. She took a moment so as to straighten the braid of her hair and then-

-a white circle of light; so bright that it flooded out what residual shadows might have continued to lurk beneath the avenues of tables and chairs alike. The snakes flinched back and Crawley and Aziraphale were forced to cover their eyes; the resonance so startling and blistering that it near about seared the flesh from their faces.

It lasted but a few, bare moments before gratefully fading; revealing in its place the true form of the Vice of Envy.

It was the first time in all their long years that Crawley and Aziraphale had witnessed such a thing; for the Vices and Virtues did not often revert to their true nature, not even when conducting liaison business within Heaven and Hell. Their human like forms were likely considered to be a more appropriate and congenial vessel by which to execute their business.

It was obvious now as to why, for there was nothing what might be considered nearly so terrifying as coming face to face with the true form of a Vice.

Larger than humans, angels and demons alike; standing at a height of nine or so feet and of considerably more substantial girth. Invidia's four signature wings were revealed in her conversion, the span of which could have easily touched to the walls to either side of the colossal room.

The Ancient Egyptians worshipped many gods; one of which was Horus, whom bore the head of an eagle and the body of a man. This interpretation had in fact been taken directly from their brief encounters with Invidia; though their own recollections of the subject material were vastly more cheerful than the reality with which Crawley and Aziraphale were confronted.

This was a Horus what might never have evoked worship. Her enormous body was draped in gilded robes, her human like legs terminating into wicked talons what might have been more befitting of a dinosaur. She had four arms, two of which were in the process of unfurling themselves from about her midsection; where they appeared to have been magically sequestered the whole time.

Her head, no longer in possession of the quiet elegance evident in her human form, bore a vague similarity to that of a falcon; a sharp, curved beak what looked to be composed of blackest marble, a tangled mohawk of blood red feathers sweeping back from the crown of the head and cascading down to below the shoulder blades.

She had no eyes. So it transpires that this was a characteristic shared by all the Vices and Virtues in the assuming of their true forms.

They were guided by God's ultimate directive. Double vision only served to cloud the agenda.

From one of the arms what was uncoiling from about Invidia's midsection, came a hand what was in turn extracting something what seemed to reside directly inside of the Vice's body. Invidia displayed nothing so much in the way of mortal discomfort as she persisted with the removal process; drawing nary a drop of blood, nor inviting any would be internal organs to splatter out from their original abodes and make their temporary residence upon the floor.

An alabaster handle came into being and continued for some time thereafter. And then, with a sudden, unexpected flourish, Invidia cast her arm wide and the weapon, what was revealed to be an unnecessarily ornate double headed axe, swept in a circle about the room; clear above the heads of all those whom resided within it. The Vices and Virtues appeared barely at all troubled by the grandiosity of the gesture; Humanitas barely closing his eyes a moment and Gula not giving so much as a pause in his snuffling of dates and figs aplenty.

Crawley and Aziraphale, not nearly so prepared for a gesture as savage at this, almost fell square on their arses from the force of the strike alone. It was the snakes however, who were the direct and unfortunate recipients of whatever volatile magic had bestowed the strike of the axe and they were thrown backwards; twisting, roiling and then shrivelling down to piles of impotent ash which billowed away on a breeze what could not have naturally passed through the enclosed space.

Invidia was not done. The axe still in hand, she crossed the room in two, gargantuan strides, snatching Crawley about the neck and elevating him to such heights that his bald head near graced the ceiling. The demon immediately relinquished whatever calm pretence he had been attempting to parlay and took instead to kicking, flailing theatrics; aware that the powerful, vice like grip about his throat could apply its full, omnipotent force at any moment and crush his soul right out of his body.

" _Aziraphale!_ " He squeaked, smacking uselessly at the Vice's enormous wrist; unaware that his entire head had already turned blue due to lack of oxygen. It was not something of which his human body actually required as to keep on functioning, but Invidia's magic was going to great strides in making it forget this. _"Don't just... stand there, ya great lump!"_

Aziraphale _was,_ much to his great consternation in later years, simply standing there. Not 'simply' so much as in what the word simply applies but he was indeed standing there and he thought he was doing a very good job in fact, of not having voided his bladder on the spot.

He felt powerless. What had they been thinking? What had _he_ been thinking? This was not a game. These were not demons, nor angels. These were beings who they could not even begin to fathom the truest most nature of. Where they had come from, what they were, the breadth of the power they had at their disposal.

If the word ineffable had ever been more applicable, he was hard pressed to think of it.

Invidia moved her terrible, horrifying void of a face closer to Crowley's currently exsanguinating features.

 **"This has all been very interesting,"** She said, her voice pertaining a distorted, haunting echo what might be likened to hearing a song played whilst your eardrums are hosting a big old blob of malaria riddled pool water. **"But play time is over, children."**

She tossed Crawley onto the stairwell, with as much care as an irate child might demonstrate to the toy what has, in some form or another, disappointed them. His spine smacked the jutting lips of stone hard and he heard a cracking resonate from somewhere deep inside of him; like a branch being broken beneath a blanket.

He had no time with which to either assess nor heal his injury, before Invidia was once more standing over him; one of her taloned feet stamping back down over his bruised neck. Each cruel looking sickle was positioned to either side of his throat and he was more than aware that the slightest wrong move, would see him sliced punitively from stem to stern.

 **"Impertinence can only be tolerated so long. God's will be done. And those who stand in Her way, will be struck down."** She leaning closer so that her breath; somehow more the terrifying for the fact that it smelt of _nothing_ washed over Crawley. **"Don't make the mistake of believing that your _feelings_ carry weight, snake. You are nothing. You are less than a boil and indisputably more irritating than a sore."**

She bore down with perhaps only a miniscule portion of her full strength; much as a human would use so as to stomp on a hapless spider what had invaded their living room.

It was force enough however, to snap Crowley's neck in two.

Aziraphale heard the awful sound of bones breaking and cried out, bringing his hands up over his mouth in horror. He had seen death before, that much was true, but he was fond of the demon in his own way and certainly did not wish for such horrendous harm to have befallen him.

"Stop! Please!" He begged, ascending the stairs and dropping to his knees before the towering might of the immortal Vice. "I beg you! It was my fault, _I_ made him approach you with this! Please, have mercy!"

He just about expected Invidia to bring one of her enormous feet down on him for the admission but if she had any such designs, they were prohibited by Humanitas, who succeeded in cutting through the tension of the room with the composed gentility what would one day see him through the myriad haunts of London town with approving nods of upper class heads.

"Terribly sorry, but I do think it a good idea that you take your leave now." He looked truly aggrieved for the entire matter and was in fact only mere days away from being perched with Aziraphale and Crowley on a stone wall within the city limits; hiccupping indecorously into what in those times had passed for a handkerchief. "There's... nothing to be done for it, I'm afraid."

"I understand." Aziraphale said and leaned hurriedly down so as grab Crawley up under the arms in a very much undignified fashion. He would normally have gone right on ahead and healed him there on the steps, but he didn't relish hanging about in what had quickly become the very much hostile of company.

Invidia eased her foot off of the demons' neck, casting a particularly censorious look towards Aziraphale before turning and marching her way back down the stairs. She returned to her human form as she went, her extravagant robes swirling about her petite figure as she returned, indifferently, to the seat upon which she had earlier been reclining. She picked up her drink and sipped from it, as though she had done nothing any the more strenuous than plucking the head off of a daisy.

If Crawley had not been paralysed and beyond the point of doing anything more the fruitful besides dribbling down his own chin, he might have torn strips off of Aziraphale for the rough treatment he was then forced to endure. Instead of picking him up (such as he rather felt he both deserved and had earned) Aziraphale instead insisted on dragging him up the stairs like a sack of dirty laundry; pounding the demons bald head into every step along the way.

By the time they had reached the entryway and Aziraphale had hauled him through the immaterial curtain dividing the corporeal hallway from the inner sanctum, Crawley was about as livid as a paraplegic vegetable could be. His eyes must have been evidence enough as to his internal disconcertment, because Aziraphale immediately got about to apologizing, passing his hand over the demon's body so as to knit together the broken bones.

"My dear..." He murmured, which was in fact one of the very few times he had referred to Crawley as such. It was almost enough to make the demon forget as to why he was so angry in the first place. Almost. "Are you quite all right?"

As the bones in his spine melded back into one functional piece, Crawley flexed out each of his limbs, found them all to be in working order and quickly gathered himself back onto his feet.

 _No, I'm not 'all right',_ he wanted to say. _I've been beaten up, broken in half a dozen places, more the likely exposed from the waist down_ (not that there was much to see at that particular juncture) _and humiliated in one of the most grandiose ways in which a demon can_ be _humiliated. Am more the likely to receive a visit from either Hastur or Ligur, on account of having interfered with the workings of the creatures far the more important than myself, on the behalf of an angel, who I may or may not in fact be developing 'feelings' for. Feelings that were progressively lessened by the unorthodox extraction method such angel employed so as to assumedly remove me from danger._

"Thanks a lot for the help." He said instead, making good and sure to squeeze some vinegar into it. He straightened his clothes, soothed grime from the back of his now thankfully unbruised head and cast Aziraphale a suitably haughty look. "Last time I go and stick my neck out for an angel."

He stalked for the dark of the hall before hesitating and then turning about to face an appropriately contrite looking Aziraphale.

"Drinks tomorrow?"

"I have a place in town." Aziraphale said, quietly relieved as he waved a hand and sent a strip of papyrus with address details scurrying over into Crawley's expectant fingers. "See you at eight?"

"Wouldn't miss it." The demon tucked the slip into his sash, straightened it with yet another imperious sniff before resuming his self-styled strut out of the temple proper. Aziraphale remained a moment longer, waiting for the tremors to ease within his body and with a much heavier feeling of being far the more indebt to a creature that he could not reasonably afford being in debt to.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: (Collapses in a ball of frizzy hair) Oh my life, that took so much more time than I thought it would. I've got work tomorrow, and I can only hope it doesn't take this long with the next six updates, or I'm going to be up past dawn trying to meet this timetable! 
> 
> Thanks as always lovelies, and sorry to both the new readers for bombarding you, and the original readers for having to wait so long for new content. I promise I am doing my best and I appreciate all of you beautiful people so much! I shall see you tomorrow, when I do my absolute utmost to both be a good little worker and to... kind of pull off an editing miracle XD
> 
> With all my love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	46. Or, in which a new tune plays in London.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They had almost reached the stairwell and felt very accomplished in their not having given anything away, when their path was blocked by the blithesomely smiling faces of both Luxuria and Avaritia...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, behemoth update part 2, my lovelies :) Once more, I apologize for the absolute spamming of updates but it is simply what must be done if I want to get the new content out before January pinches to a close. Thank you as always for your support and your patience. (Rolls up sleeves) Now... I've got a lot of editing to pull together before the day draws to a close, so... wish me luck!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 7:25pm~** _   
_**Basement Sate - London Soho...** _

_**Current Day... ** _

"That sounds awfully embarrassing for you." Gabriel grossly understated.

"No stranger to gross humiliation, me." Aziraphale said, smiling as Crowley flashed him a very subtle yet incontestably withering look. "The point being, is that if you are looking for folks able to read the Vices and Virtues the riot act, you're barking up the wrong tree. Contractual exception or no, there's nothing in this world or the next that can stand against their power. Except perhaps God Herself."

"And She ain't talkin'." Crowley winced as Aziraphale kicked him once again in his already bruised ankle. " _Isn't. Is not talking."_

"So I am afraid that you've wasted your time." Aziraphale said, adding some finality to the proceedings by throwing back the last of his drink and dropping the paper umbrella into the base of his glass.

"But won't you at least hear us ou-" Gabriel paused, turning to look at Lord Beelzebub who had suddenly sat up straight and stiff in their seat like a gnat infested meerkat. Their nostrils hiked, as though catching the scent of something delicious baking from the kitchen. "What is it?"

"Something'z changed." They said, eyes panning about the room. Aziraphale took a few sharp breaths in through the nose he had borrowed from Crowley. Something _did_ seem different; as though the energy in the room had taken a dramatic shift. It was not a scent what humans would have the capacity to perceive, but rather a wholly spiritual odour; one which possessed no earthly comparison.

"Something _has_ changed." He murmured offhand to Crowley, who, now being in possession of Aziraphale's much weaker nose, turned about in his seat, trying to get a bead on anything what might have altered within the bar.

Beelzebub caught sight of them first. Their eyes widened, which was not an expression often at all seen upon the face of the Lord of the Infernal regions. They set their drink down like a hot potato and immediately slid from their seat, hunkering as though crawling through the trenches under enthusiastic gunfire.

"We have to go."

Gabriel too caught sight of whatever it was that Beelzebub had seen and made rather the stupid display of pointing at them across the table. "Is that-?"

" _Yes! Juzt..._ " Beelzebub gestured violently towards the doorway with their head and started making their awkward, hunched way towards it. Gabriel set down his water glass with middle class levels of decorum, slid off his chair and settled onto his haunches upon the floor. He stared across the table at Aziraphale and Crowley, looking particularly ridiculous even with the serious expression on his handsome face.

" _We'll be in touch."_ He said before then following along behind Beelzebub, with the appearance of a rather large, impeccably tailored goose out for a waddle. Aziraphale and Crowley watched them, brows raised in duplicate astonishment as the pair managed to squat-walk their way over to the stairs, whereupon they proceeded to climb them on all fours like a dog. They were certainly attracting attention from the other humans within the bar, so one could not suppose they had been discreet in their departure.

"... Right." Crowley said after a moment of being silently, completely and incontestably perplexed. "Well _that_ happened."

"Indeed." Aziraphale took another whiff of the air, as he glanced over his shoulder towards the bar. "Something _has_ changed... not sure _what_ precisely..."

"You wanna switch back?" Crowley asked. "Give that nose a crack with someone who knows how it works?"

"Probably a good idea." He glanced about, satisfied that most of the bargoers eyes were still either focused on the stairs or focused on the conversation they were having about the bizarre duo who had only just finished climbing said stairs. "Don't think anyone is looking... best slouch down anyway. Be on the safe side."

He and Crowley slid down into their seats, far enough so that their heads could not be glimpsed above the top of the leather booth. With a snap of his fingers, Crowley put a freeze on the interior of the bar before then reaching over with the same hand and clasping it about Aziraphale's.

They did not bother with making anything the fancy or meaningful of it. Nor did they linger too long in the transient bliss of the moment. They passed their bodies back over, with about as much ceremony as one returns a borrowed raincoat.

Returned henceforth to the forms of which they were familiar, both Aziraphale and Crowley emitted near identical groans of displeasure for the states in which said bodies had been handed back.

"Good grief..." Aziraphale slurred, attempting to sit up but slopping back down into his seat like a sea lion on a water slide. The entire room was spinning and his bladder was so painfully swollen he was surprised Crowley hadn't spent the entire exchange jiggling about with his legs crossed _. "I'm ash drunk ash shhkunk..."_

Crowley emitted an equally helpless sounding moan, almost slipping entirely beneath the table. "And I'm as bloated as a hot air balloon..." He muffled a belch what was far the more gastric heartburn than it was cumulative gas. "Ohhh... ooh that was _too_ rich, angel... I'm not used to eating things that rich... Awww, I'm gonna be _sick_..."

"Well, at leashht we have _that_ much in common." The angel grumbled, squeezing his eyes shut a couple of times in the vague hope that it would somewhow centre his vision. It would have been a kindness to have called it a band-aid solution.

"Just - sober up then!" Crowley snapped, rubbing at a stomach he knew he had little chance of successfully returning to the bonds of his trousers. "Put the booze back in the bottle and be done with it!" He slapped the back of his hand against Aziraphale's thigh. "And stop talking like Sean Connery!"

"I'm not talking like... Shawwn Connery." The angel protested, who indeed sounded to be getting progressively more Scottish by the moment. "And I can't jusht refill the bottle, it would look _rude!_ "

"Rude nothing, I'll just take the bottle with us and drink it again."

"Oh, how dishgushting!" Aziraphale garbled, appalled by the thought of Crowley recycling already the once drunk wine (though it would hardly have been the first time). He did not however see any other means by which he was going to be able to hoist himself up in time to get to the lavatory without wetting himself and so, with a sigh and a suitably strained expression, pushed a good third of the alcohol out of his system and back into the bottle centre table.

He left just enough in his system so as to keep himself feeling somewhat relaxed. He still needed to go to the toilet and cursed Crowley for holding it in quite as long as he had, because it was obvious he could not go anywhere until they had figured out what had thrown the spook into Beelzebub and Gabriel.

" _Scrum-diddly-umcious?"_ Aziraphale hissed as an afterthought, feeling there were some obvious slights what needed to be cleared from the air before they continued. "When on _earth_ have you ever heard me saying something so ridiculous as _that?"_

"You say ridiculous things all the time; how am I supposed to know where you draw the line?" Crowley grumbled, massaging his fingers into the swelling bulge where his aching stomach was uncomfortably interred. "And for that matter, could you have sat with my legs any further apart?"

"You _always_ sit with your legs apart!"

"Not _that_ far apart! Could have docked an aircraft carrier in there. I mean, what kind of a cankerous slurry do you take me for?"

"I don't suppose you to be any such thing as a... oh, for someone's sake, we're getting off track. Are you getting a scent of anything?" Aziraphale asked, straightening up in his seat as the spell what held the occupants of the bar frozen stiff eased its clutches free and people resumed whatever business they had been in the midst of; unaware that they had, in fact, been interrupted at all.

"Apart from my own rapidly expanding large intestine?" The demon groused, sectioning one hand to the top of the booth like a foundering passenger attempting to climb back atop a slippery life raft. He hurled himself painfully up, whiffing at the air as he came. "Something _is_ different."

"Does it smell like the Vices and Virtues?" Aziraphale asked, keeping his eyes now firmly facing forwards. His shock of white hair meant that he hardly blended in discretely and Crowley himself was as equally distinct with his red coif and dark sunglasses. If eyes were already on them, their glancing about the room would have only raised more suspicion by the moment.

"Well, they've all got a different scent, don't they? Not a one size fits all sort of situation here." Crowley took another sniff, his hands occupied with the seemingly fruitless reaffixing of his pants button. "Something _is_ familiar though... historic... long time ago... _Seriously?!_ I don't think I've ever _been_ so fat! What in Hell's name have you done to me?!"

Aziraphale ignored the latent histrionics, much as he was long since well practiced at. "Long time ago Egypt, you mean? Or... long time ago Garden of Eden?"

"Longer than Egypt. Might be two of the one's we didn't see at the temple." Crowley had turned himself sideways in the booth now, head resting on Aziraphale's lap, whilst spreading his legs out so that they sprawled ungainly into the aisle. He grunted, wriggled and flexed in an effort to slither himself back into his newly purchased pants; remembering why he had preferred to simply magic clothing onto himself. "You recognize anyone?"

Aziraphale did not have many particularly unique and clever magical tricks such as Crowley. But he did have one, which he did not utilize often. Collective three-hundred and sixty degree vision, by way of the immaterial eyes what existed as part and parcel of his spiritual form.

It took a great deal of magic so as to access them. More to the point however, Aziraphale did not _like_ accessing them. It rather made him feel like an enormous blow-fly; a creature with which he enjoyed precious little sympathy regards.

They were terrible creatures, what had a propensity to loiter about near as close to any exposed orifice as they could find. Carrying the residue of filth, the intentions of maggots, the rancorous desire for natures most disgusting and disturbing of evacuations.

Not to mention the _sound._ That incomparably irritating ' _buzz-buzz-buzz'_ of their nasty little filth encrusted legs rubbing, it was loathsome.

Aziraphale had nearly crushed one with a book once. Had managed to pull himself up at the last moment.

Had often regretted it.

Smarmy little dotard had been marching its despicable dance across the chocolate finger he had been previous moments earlier enjoying.

Aziraphale however understood that these were ridiculous affiliations and so, with a soft sigh, closed his corporeal eyes and opened those what comprised the borders of his celestial spirit.

It could be an overwhelming amount of conflagrating information to sift through; as the eyes took in all potential directions at once and Aziraphale had long since gotten used to possessing only the singular channel by which to receive visual information. It took him a few moments so as to get his bearings and when he did, it was not long before he caught sight of precisely what it was that had sent Gabriel and Beelzebub scuttling for the exit.

"Luxuria." He murmured, recognizing that very much signature expanse of glorious black curls what had taken up stock beside the bar. It was no surprise really that it had taken so long for anyone to have taken notice of her; she was currently surrounded by a throng of eager suitors, just as likely drawn in by her natural exhuming of lustful pheromones as they were by the slip of clothing that she was hardly at all wearing.

Crowley groaned, tilting his head back in dismay and managing at long last to re-hook and rezip his now far the tighter than necessary pants. " _Lust..._ oy vay... Course she would drift into a place as nice as this one."

"Well, it's not great news for us." Aziraphale said, opening his external eyes and allowing his spiritual ones to recede. "Vices and Virtues are like locusts; never the one without the other far behind. We need to get out of here."

"Read my mind, angel." Crowley carefully and discretely hoisted himself back up and then eased his cheek over his shoulder, taking a glimpse towards the bar himself. His brows bore down over the lenses of his glasses. "Oi... correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that Avaritia?"

Aziraphale took another look through one of the rear facing eyes. Amidst the buzzing throng of suitors, one did indeed stand out. A dark skinned man, with eyes far the brighter green than any regular humans had any hope of being. He was watching Luxuria with a small smile, seeming to be enjoying the spectacle of which he bore casual witness.

"I do believe it is." Aziraphale shuttered the eye again, he himself now frowning down towards the table. "That's odd... Humanitas said that the Vices and Virtues are drawn to their respective halves... why then..." He looked up as Crowley started batting excitedly at his arm. "I say, whatever is the matter?"

"They're _snogging,_ that's what's the matter!" Crowley gleefully hissed and Aziraphale could not resist now from twisting about entirely in his seat so as to get a look for himself. Sure enough, the two contrarily pared vices were enthusiastically locking lips by the countertop; leaving the throng of anticipatory humans naturally disappointed by the conclusion.

"Hmm. Maybe everything isn't so rosy in retirement as we thought. Shelve that slice of information away for a rainy day." Crowley said, still grinning as his mobile phone gave an attention-grabbing bleat from the tabletop. He picked it up, his smile somewhat the softening at what he then saw. "Aww. Well ain't that sweet."

"What are you babbling on with now?" Aziraphale asked, attempting once more to keep his head out of sight behind the leather of the booth. It would not at all have surprised him if Luxuria and Avaritia already knew that they were there, but that hardly meant they needed to go about advertising the fact.

"The picture I posted of us. Getting tons of likes and lovey faces. See?" Crowley waggled the phone out in front of Aziraphale's face, which hardly at all helped with his reading it. He did however manage to catch sight of one comment the photograph had received; a missive from Crowley's work colleague Alice, which read: " _OMG Alex. most beautiful man that ever was :) leave that nasty Cumquat and I will make you cupcakes every day for the rest of your life xxx ooo_

Aziraphale smiled. He had a soft spot for Alice, having gotten to know her somewhat in the time that he and Crowley had regrettably spent apart.

"Sweet girl, that one."

Crowley scoffed, flicking through the rest of the comments espoused by all the random peoples he was somehow acquainted with. "Sweet because she's sweet on _you_ , you mean."

"Hardly." Aziraphale replied elegantly and added then, with a not so modest smile: "Though it certainly says a great deal so far as her taste is concerned."

Crowley, now having had the sense to have slumped down in the booth himself, made a mock laughing face before then being distracted by another bell like ding from his phone.

"Ah, speak of the devil." He said somewhat ironically. "Alice just texted and asked if we'd like to meet her and the girls for a drink?" He waved the phone from side to side in what he must have supposed to be an enticing manner. "Not too far from here...?"

Aziraphale shrugged, feeling that the night was still very much young. "Has to be an improvement after tonight's rather lacklustre performance. Besides, I still owe you for that time I didn't come out for karaoke." He considered a moment, eyebrows creasing down at the corners of his eyes with concern. "Its'... _not_ karaoke, is it?"

"Naww, love. _The Faltering Fullback._ Irish themed pub. You can blame Jeanie for that one." Crowley eased one arse cheek just far enough off of the leather seat cushion so as to slip the mobile phone back into his pants pocket. "Just good company, good liqour and good times."

"Sounds... good!" Aziraphale chirped, giving an unconscious wiggle of his shoulders which looked ever the more bizarre given that he was currently hunkered halfway under a table. "Now... let us attempt to leave as discretely as possible."

They gathered up the water pistol and the 'cursed' book and attempted to slide their way out of their seats without being noticed. Instead of making a would be spectacle of themselves by commando crawling across the floor of the establishment, Aziraphale and Crowley decided to act as natural as possible. Pretending as though they were not in fact aware of the Vices' presence, they joined hands and made for the stairwell, Crowley thankfully eschewing the reappropriation of the recycled alcohol from the bottle upon the table. Aziraphale reasoned he was far too uncomfortable and bloated to pay it much mind. For his part, he simply wanted to reach the lavatory before he ended up doing something what might be considered incredibly childish.

They had almost reached the stairwell and felt very accomplished in their not having given anything away, when their path was blocked by the blithesomely smiling faces of both Luxuria and Avaritia.

Aziraphale felt Crowley's entire arm go tense. The demon was in fact gripping his hand so tightly it was not hard to imagine that he might have been a woman in the throes of labour. Though his expression gave nothing away, Aziraphale knew that Crowley was very much panicking.

He had good reason. He had seen and more to the point felt firsthand what the Vices were capable of. Aziraphale could hardly fault him for being frightened.

He squeezed. Attempted to send some calming energy down through the interlocking of their fingers, the press of their palms, right down on into Crowley's diabolical spirit. _I'm here,_ he said, without speaking, fighting down his own instinctual urge to unfurl his wings and curl them protectively about his lovers rigid, frightened body. _I'm here with you. I won't let a one of them harm you, not ever again._

"Well, as I live and breathe! If it isn't the Principality Aziraphale and the demon..." Luxuria paused a moment, pursing her full lips as she waved an index finger idly about in a circle before Crowley's stupefied expression. "Don't tell me... Crawley...?"

"Crowley." The demon managed to sort of blurt out. He could never remain quiet, so far as the correcting of his chosen name was concerned.

"A small world indeed." Avaritia said, his smile not so much as altering a jot. His human body was that of a tall, generously broad shouldered man and the arms what fed down into the hands what he'd slipped into his pockets were thick with muscle. "That was your time freezing spell, I take it?"

 _Well, it sure as shit wasn't one of the humans,_ Crowley almost spat back sarcastically. It didn't seem like a good idea to go indulging that particular urge and so he went instead to nod, when a tight squeeze from Aziraphale's hand pulled him up short.

"It was _one_ of us, yes." The angel replied on his behalf and Crowley understood. It would be dangerous to let the Vices know too much about their particular abilities. Obscurity was their best means of defence and they would need every shield at their disposal if they were to inadvertently make enemies of these demonstrably powerful creatures.

Luxuria raised one of her perfectly shaped eyebrows, her eyes twinkling with amusement. Aziraphale's intent, it seemed, had not at all been lost on her.

"A very clever trick. Has no effect on _us_ of course, but a considerably powerful spell to pull off successfully." Her gaze shifted from Aziraphale to Crowley, waiting it seemed for one of them to give something up. The angel and demon kept their faces similarly stony.

"Well you know what they say; a good magician never reveals his secrets." Aziraphale responded with a very beautiful, entirely defiant looking smile. Crowley was himself quietly in awe as to how much the once timid angel had changed in all the years they had known one another. He never would have dreamed of speaking to any of his superiors in such a precocious manner, let alone a pair of beings what could so easily squash him into celestial jam as soon as look at him.

 _It's because he's protecting me,_ Crowley realized and felt light-headed from the thought. _I'm what matters to him now. He doesn't_ care _about toeing the line anymore. He's going to these extremes to make himself look an impenetrable wall, of which no one could hope to find a weakness through which to exploit._

_A wall which he had built so as to place Crowley in the centre. Well beyond reach of those who might wish to bring harm against him._

Luxuria looked very much as though she wished to push the point further but then shrugged the matter off as though it were in fact of little importance.

"Whatever the case, it seems a strange thing that we should run into one another like this." Her eyes lowered pointedly to focus on the angel and the demons linked hands. "Though there do appear to be any number of strange things going about at the moment."

Crowley thought for a second that Aziraphale might dash his hand away as though it had suddenly caught fire. He did in fact tighten his grip.

"Oh, yes. Yes, well, you know... I imagine that this is hardly the sort of thing you might need to go mentioning to my superiors in Heaven." Aziraphale suddenly sounded a great deal more blustery, as though he were in fact deeply troubled by the idea of his having been caught with his hand in the diabolic cookie jar. "Discretion is the better part of valour after all. Though of course, you _are_ Vices, so..."

A person of lesser intuition might have found themselves very much confused by Aziraphale's dramatic one-eighty. But Crowley caught on quickly; by virtue of having known the angel quite so long as he had and the information what had been provided to them by Gabriel and Lord Beelzebub.

For whatever the reason, as now expelled agents of their respective realms, Aziraphale and Crowley were considered to be exempt from the contracts which effectively bound their celestial and hellish affiliates. Though neither could be accused of being in possession of powers or statute what might render them a threat to the likes of the Vices or Virtues, they were still in the best position to take some manner of action.

At least, this appeared to be what Gabriel and Beelzebub had been insinuating.

Informing Humanitas of the fact they were now 'dishonourably discharged' had been a mistake, Aziraphale was quickly realizing. For if the Vices and Virtues got it in their minds that the angel and demon posed a potential threat to their god given mission, they were more the certain to take steps to amend this.

They needed to pretend as though they were still in fact in the active employ of Heaven and Hell. Even if they were only able to convince them long enough to get themselves safely out from under this conversation; which lingered idly in the air above their heads like the head of an axe about to fall at any moment.

 _Bastards,_ Aziraphale thought, smiling still on the outside, whilst raging quietly within. He was hardly even aware of his having sworn, even if the curse had occurred internally. _Gabriel and Beelzebub both. Putting the two of us in this position. They could not leave well enough alone._

"Um... yeah." Crowley eventually piped up, making an even greater point of staring at Aziraphale with the most cavity inducing, soppy, love struck look on his face imaginable. As if to suggest he had been so incapable of resisting the charms of the angel, that he had actually succumbed with the powers of Hell still hovering at his elbows. "Know what they say... heart wants what the heart wants, and all." He glanced now towards the Vices, biting his lip as though overwhelmed with anxiety. It was not a difficult state to accurately convey. "Maybe we just, uh... keep this to ourselves, yeah? Last thing I need is one of my bosses to find out I've been schmoozing an angel in my spare time."

"We too, understand what it means to be discreet about... certain matters." Aziraphale added meaningfully and Crowley almost fell through the floor in shock. The angel was of course not so subtly referencing what the two of them had seen taking place up by the bar. That he had stated it in such a cool even tone did nothing to divert from the fact that he was clearly making a threat and Crowley was gobsmacked by his gall.

Gobsmacked... and more than a little turned on.

Luxuria and Avaritia might have responded either the violently or defensively in response to Aziraphale's cheek. They did, in fact, neither. Luxuria, almost in direct contrast to the reaction what might have been expected, smiled in an almost motherly manner, reaching out one at a time to brush her fingertips up beneath the demon and angel's chins.

"Your secret is safe with us." She purred, her eyes near about dancing at how Crowley flinched away from her touch with a disgusted curl of his lip. "We had best be running along. Much to do."

"Indeed." Avaritia agreed, spawning a large, fur coat out of some unforeseen pocket in the air and assisting Luxuria in feeding her arms through the sleeves. "Have yourselves a fine evening, gentleman."

He extended one of his large hands in a congenial manner. Aziraphale shook it. Crowley, as to be expected, turned his nose up and so the Vice, with a somewhat tolerant smile, gave him a pat to the arm what just about knocked the demon clear off of his feet.

"One other thing," Luxuria remarked, one dagger stilettoed heel pistoned into the grooves of the first stair leading out of the bar proper. She looked over her fur draped shoulder, with all the poise of a lion surveying the expanse of its verdant kingdom. "Be mindful who you speak with. Wouldn't want to see such sweet things as yourselves getting in trouble."

"It would be... unfortunate." Avaritia added, still wearing that same, somewhat menacing smile as he took Luxuria by the hand and assisting with guiding her graceful way up the stairs. How she managed to keep all the appropriate bits and pieces under control in the tight swathe of what appeared to be bathing material that she was wearing was nothing sort of a miracle.

Aziraphale and Crowley watched them go, managing to keep the smiles on their faces until the Vices backs had faded out through the cocktail bars door. Once they were gone, Crowley whooshed out a large gust of anxious air what might have successfully filled the gallows of a hot air balloon.

"Thought our goose was cooked _that_ time." He said, his heart hammering violently against the modest wall of his ever the more modest chest.

"Indeed." Aziraphale took up Crowley's hand between both of his own and kissed the demons still very much rigid fingers. Attempting to soothe him in some menial manner. "Oh, I could _kill_ Beelzebub and Gabriel for dragging us into this!"

"You've never killed anything before, remember?" Crowley said, sort of ironically given that the angel had once swapped clothes with a French executioner and then watched the poor man get hauled off to the guillotine without so much as blinking an eye.

It was a splitting hairs thing, where this particular angel was concerned. He hadn't been the one, after all, to let go of the rope to which the blade was attached.

"Well, I could kill _them! Vigorously!_ " Aziraphale exclaimed and Crowley had to laugh at the wonder of what a 'vigorous' killing would entail. "Are you quite all right, my dear? You're shaking."

"I'm fine." Crowley brushed it off, somewhat annoyed at Aziraphale for having mentioned it in the first place. Just because he had the propensity to morph into a quivering weasel where the threat of imminent death and or maiming was concerned, was hardly cause enough to draw attention to it.

He would like to see how Aziraphale faired if it was he, in fact, what had spent six thousand years receiving unhappy visits from the likes of Hastur and Ligur. Visits what were filled with the joyous sound of snapping bones, crushed cartilage and partial to complete exsanguination.

They had removed a toe once. And kept it for some eight months before finally sending it back, by way of hellish carrier pigeon. A pigeon what had then seen fit to set up roost in the corner of Crowley's bedroom, standing guard over the package what contained his toe, cawing belligerently and attempting to peck out the demon's eyes whenever he got close enough to sign for the delivery.

Little wonder that he was wound tighter than an antique glockenspiel.

"Let's just go. Try and salvage some sort of enjoyment out of the night." Crowley tugged Aziraphale along by the hand, the two of them mounting the stairs and walking side by side to the top. Neither one mentioned it to the other, but there was a very peculiar sensation what had started working its way through them. Seeming to branch outwards from the dull tingling sensation what had appeared beneath their chins, Crowley's arm and Aziraphale's right hand.

Neither mentioned it. They might have thought themselves a little silly for doing so.

For it was very faint.

A tiny thing.

Much like a seed.

* * *

**~X~**

"Was that cruel of us, do you think?" Avaritia asked.

"Cruel?" Luxuria's long lashes fluttered coquettishly over her violet covered eyes. She smiled. "Hardly."

They slid into the backseat of the taxi. Gave instructions to the driver as to where they wanted next to go.

"If anything, we've just given them a night to remember." The capital Vice of lust laughed, took a hand mirror clean out of the air and examined the already immaculate curls of her beautiful hair. "And there won't be too many more of those left to enjoy."

"What a virtuous sentiment." Avaritia teased and received a sharp, slap to the arm on account of it.

All around them, the city of London was coming alive. As any number of indulgences and desires were gleefully surrendered to.

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 7:32pm~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's...** _

"What are you DOING, you lunatic?!"

Dagon snorted, reefing her face up out of the pillow in which it was currently buried.

"What?" She grunted, rolling onto her side and properly taking stock of her situation. She appeared to be laying belly down on Aziraphale's bed where she had been, she realised for the better part of the past ten minutes.

"Have you actually been taking a nap while I've been out here searching?!" Uriel exclaimed, experiencing a not often indulged urge to cross the room and pitch the demon onto the floor. She battened it down with all the celestial patience she had at her disposal; which was dwindling ever more rapidly down the preternatural plughole by the moment.

"... sure. Let's go with that." Dagon said, pushing herself back up onto her feet and straightening her attire. She gave her head a shake, attempting to clear the cobwebs out.

She hadn't been drunk many times in her thousands of years of existence. Though this did very much feel very much like the sensation of being inebriated. And rather considerably, at that.

"Does this... Aziraphale..." she asked, crossing to the built in and pulling open one of the doors, coming face to face with a row of identical and perfectly pressed periwinkle shirts. "Does he have some sort of... I don't know... special abilities you haven't yet made us aware of?"

"Such as?" Uriel asked distractedly. She had picked up a picture frame from the bedside table and was disgusted to find a photograph of the demon Crowley brooding back at her. She opened up the frame and checked the rear of the photo and found nothing except the words "Crowley, April 15th, 2019" with a small x which Uriel wasn't at all sure how to interpret.

"Well I don't know! Some sort of..." Dagon trailed off, halfway buried in the parting she had made between the shirts and overwhelmed by the sudden desire to pitch herself into the wardrobe and wrap herself in the tidily arrangued assortment of garments. "... demon... weakening pheromone... what makes them feel..." she pinched a shirt sleeve between her fingers, brought it to her nose and inhaled. "... powerless and susceptible?"

"Not that I'm aware." Uriel replied, careless and uncomprehending as she set the frame down and turned around. She performed a violent full body double take however, to find Dagon once again face down on the bed, in the midst of performing something what might best be described as enthusiastic cunnilingus on one of Aziraphale's decorative throw pillows. "Would you stop that!?" She shrieked and tried to remember the last time anything so much as resembling a shriek had come out of an Archangel.

"Argh, I can't _help_ it! Dear Satan, you have _no_ idea what this is like." Dagon groaned, rolling onto her back and twisting the blankets about herself like a beached mermaid in a sea of kelp. "There's something screwy about the angel. He smells of everything that's lovely and it MAKES lovely feelings inside of you and..." she groaned again, a helpless, hateful sounding groan. "I just want to grab all these blankets and shove them up my nose! Even if they do smell a bit like that awful Crowley."

If blatant disgust was a measurable construct, Uriel's would have by now been exceeding the length of your industry level tape measure. "Good Lord... you don't suppose they... sleep in the same bed, do you?"

"Fancy they do a lot more than just sleep in it." Dagon supplied with a sinister grin, unaware of course that for all the want of sharing said bed for matters contrary to napping, precious little of said otherwise had actually occurred.

Uriel was forced to balance her weight on the en-suite s doorframe; less her legs give out from underneath her.

"And you're still laying there?!"

The cold reality of what she may in fact have been interring herself within was force enough to drive Dagon up off of the bed and start brushing herself off. Uriel didn't much want to touch the linen herself, but everything needed to be left in the same way in which it was found and so she quickly got to work making the bed up.

"You haven't found anything then?" Dagon asked, standing on her tiptoes and swishing her finger from side to side so as to magically shift objects about on the upper shelves of the wardrobe.

"Nothing. Which is not surprising, given everything I know about Aziraphale. Disappointing that he could be so predictable though." Uriel rearranged the throw pillows, uncertain as to whether she had in fact got them right. Aziraphale's shop might have been a lesson in chaotic disorganisation, but his bedroom was arranged in accordance with a fastidious attention to detail what brought his military upbringing into sharp focus. She waved a hand across the coverlet, espousing it of the whatever wrinkles remained and tightened the sheet corners so that only the most stringent of crowbars might have succeeded in loosening them.

"They might have stored such things at Crowley's home." Dagon surmised, straightening the items in the wardrobe (mostly seasonal ornaments and what appeared to be a box of magic tricks) and slid the hangers back into neat alignment.

"In which case, Sandalphon and that... Hastur will likely locate them." Uriel said, feeling a vibration stir from within her blazer pocket. She extracted her Cele-phone and checked the message what appeared on screen. "Good timing. It's Gabriel. Says they needed to call off the meeting early. Two of the Vices showed up at the bar."

This sobered Dagon up far the more than anything else might have done. "That's too much of a coincidence."

"It's NOT a coincidence." Uriel agreed, closing the Cele-phone and slipping it back into her pocket. "That's a warning."

"They're watching them." Dagon said, feeling for the first time in a very long time, a pure rush of fear.

If the contingency team discovered that they were interfering...

"We need to go." Uriel was out through the bedroom door before the demon could so much as twitch. Dagon quickly slid the cupboard doors shut, switched off the lights and followed. Uriel showed some restraint in waiting for her to buckle back into her ridiculous high heels before holding open the storefront door and allowing the demon to exit out in front of her.

"Would ya look at that? I made eleven pounds!" The Disposable exclaimed excitedly, holding out a hatful of jangling coins. Uriel responded by flipping the hat up into the air and sending the demons hard won profits clattering across the ground.

"I'll report our observations to Gabriel." She murmured, falling into step alongside Dagon, who was making tracks for the nearest appropriate alley as fast as her tottery high heels could take her.

"And I'll bring Lord Beelzebub up to speed." The demon said, veering off and around into a pungent inlay what resided between two of SoHo's finest establishments; a sex shop and a mostly defunct laundromat. She placed her fingertips to her forehead in an ironic salute, as an offended looking Disposable drifted up alongside, clutching his now empty hat. "Always a pleasure."

"Dagon."

"Uriel."

The Archangel ascended to Heaven. The two demons ground their way back down into the belly of Hell.

They did not know it yet, but they were the elite few what had gotten out of London in the categorical nicking of time.

* * *

**~X~**


	47. Or, in which Aziraphale and Crowley visit a bar.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale could see that Crowley was very confused by his sudden dramatic turn-about play on most every one of his sensibilities and smiled warmly in an attempt to assuage him. This night, he wanted to say, has started out so terribly poorly. And what we have learned has helped me to realize that what time we have is ever so precious. I want to soak in as much enjoyment as I am able, in whatever time it is that we have left. Treasure every rare and perfect drop of it. 
> 
> Take what is offered in hand and indulge it...

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 8:45pm~** _   
_**The Faltering Fullback - London...** _

_The Faltering Fullback_ was not what you might call Aziraphale's usual sort of stomping ground.

That being said, it had its' own undeniable charm.

Being a busy Saturday night, Crowley was required to park further down the street; in a dark, stale looking offshoot which might have gotten the wind up of a regular human being. They trotted down the sidewalk, hand in contended hand, chatting softly about the nights experiences thus far, before pulling a sharp left onto Perth street.

_The Faltering Fullback_ was situated right there on the crossroads, juxtaposed by a wall of three story residential flats with ground floor bay windows, by which a cherry blossom tree in full bloom stood peaceful vigil. The pub was liberally covered from head to toe in climbing vines, such that it resembled a rock what might have been fished from the bottom of a river bed. The green double doors were offset by a pair of water features; their trickling sonata just as verily cheerful as the sounds of voices and music what was coming from inside.

Aziraphale held the door open for Crowley, smiling at the canopy of leaves what was roosting above their heads. It made the demon titter fondly; this reminder that for all his love of fancy things, Aziraphale was still so often amused by the simpler pleasures.

He might have been accustomed to propping himself up at expensive locales such as the Ritz, but he had far too much class to ever turn his nose up at the more affordable establishments. This was an angel, after all, who had seen the world rise from nothing more than sand and dirt and foundling concepts. Anything, by comparison, was astonishing in its eventuation.

Aziraphale waited for Crowley to swagger on into the public house, before stepping in behind him and making good and certain to close the door properly in his wake. He paused a moment, just offside of the doorway, to take it all in.

The atmosphere, he thought, was warm and reminded him, in some ways of his own bookshop. There was an assortment of what he could only describe as 'brickabrack' hanging from the ceiling and festooning the circumference of the bar. It had a cosy ambience, peaceful background music and milling throngs of eclectic, cheerful people joyfully cajoling one another with the various days daring-do's. There was certainly over attention to detail where wood was concerned. The never being out of eyeshot, or indeed reaching distance of a full pint of Guinness.

Aziraphale usually preferred quiet locales, where he was able to both concentrate on his own thoughts and the words of the person to whom he was sharing the company of. Most usually Crowley. The more crowded, more accessible a location, the less likely he was to be able to relax.

That wasn't to say he didn't mind a more raucous setting on occasion.

On this occasion in particular, he felt it was rather the more needed.

"Girls are sitting up top in the garden." Crowley said, reaching down to take Aziraphale's hand again and guiding him along past the bar. He must have been here before, the angel reasoned, for he seemed to have a good idea as to where he was going.

He was quietly relieved as well, to hear that they would be sitting outside. The night was still far too warm for comfort and the air inside of the bar was thick and humid and starting to smell the slightest bit ripe.

People cast curious glances towards Aziraphale and Crowley as they breezed past. Crowley for his part didn't seem to give so much as a hoot and a half as to what anyone else thought but Aziraphale certainly took notice. He supposed it was still not a regularly encountered thing; two men with the appearance of being on fast encroachment towards middle-age walking hand in hand through an Irish themed pub.

Never the mind the fact that these were two men who looked as though they might never have so much as found reason to sit on a bus bench together, so much as hold hands.

It turned out to be a bit of a mission to locate the garden area; with Crowley leading Aziraphale through a winding circuit of rooms as though they were rats in a maze. Eventually, they happened upon some stairs leading up and put their hamstrings once more to the grind in slumping their way from step to step before then emerging out into the upstairs garden.

Aziraphale was quietly impressed by the setting. There appeared to be a decent representation of bamboo generously spattered about the place, a concentration of the same leafy vines what covered the pub from head to foundation and jovial spattering's of pink, purple, white and lavender flowers. There was an upstairs bar and, for some reason, what looked like Amazonian tribal masks adhered to walls and support beams alike. As though an Irish businessman had perhaps taken himself on a tropical holiday and decided to bring back every tokenistic item he had been talked into purchasing every time he had set foot off of his cruise liner.

Crowley's work colleagues had dug themselves in at a corner booth, which was framed by a low wall of flowers and watched over by a grey statue of something what appeared to have wings. Jeanie was sitting facing towards the bar, what perched offside of the stairwell and she hopped immediately to her feet, towing Alice along for the ride as the pair fairly much bum rushed Crowley and Aziraphale.

More to the point; they bum-rushed Aziraphale. The angel found himself in the, for the most part, unaccustomed position of being sandwiched between two women, neither waiting their turn for their hug or to leave big, purposefully obnoxious lipstick prints upon his face. He was given no time to recover before Alice had taken him by the hand and dragged him back over to the booth, with the instructions that he was to sit next to her. Crowley, hardly at all looking surprised that he was treated with about the same affection as pubic crabs, simply trailed along behind, permitting himself to be comforted by Jeanie's less than consoling pats to the inside elbow.

There was a young woman who Aziraphale had not yet met waiting for them at the booth. She appeared to be in her mid-twenties (it was difficult to guess a humans age with any degree of accuracy) black, with her dreadlock style hair pulled back into a fashionable high-ponytail and a stud in her nose.

She was very attractive, so far as Aziraphale could tell (and if the appreciative looks of the men milling about outside where in any way to be trusted) and smiled warmly at him as she introduced herself as Chloe.

The name rung a bell with Aziraphale and he then remembered, with a smile, as to why. Of course. Chloe had been the one who had been talking about getting her private parts waxed and this had in turn triggered off Crowley's short lived, though hyper-focused preoccupation with improving his own body hair maintenance.

Aziraphale thought he really ought to buy her a drink. A sort of thanks for giving him perhaps the biggest laugh he'd had in some time.

He doubted Crowley would appreciate the sentiment.

"Thank fuck you guys are out," Alice murmured, sinking into the booth and fairly much tugging Aziraphale down along with her. "My ex is over at the bar showing off his new piece of fluff."

Crowley, having slipped onto the left hand side of the booth, facing Aziraphale, glanced towards the bar and gave a low, clearly teasing whistle. Apparently, he knew precisely who he was looking for. "Oooh, the fluff is blonde."

"Well, we all know _you_ like the blondes." Jeanie chuckled, dropping in alongside of him and tugging a ten ounce glass of beer towards herself.

Alice did look particularly sullen, Aziraphale observed and though he had absolutely no idea how it felt to be in her situation, he supposed it couldn't have been much different to when Crowley had come dancing up the aisle of the church in the 1940's and Aziraphale felt that oblique tug of tension race through him at seeing a person he cared for deeply, whom he had parted with on not so gracious terms.

It was a painful thing and the angel could see that Alice had not yet perhaps had enough to drink so as to be able to feel a more at ease with her own uncomfortable situation. Sympathetic to her plight, Aziraphale reached over, plucked up the young lady's hand and gave it what he hoped to be a comforting pat.

"Well," He said and with no small amount of mirth: "Won't he be jealous when he looks over and sees you sitting here with me?"

The girls immediately took to laughing at this, as did Crowley; which was quite all right, for this was the nature in which the comment had been intended. Clearly, you would be hard pressed to look at someone like Aziraphale, sitting next to a young woman and presume that the arrangement was anything the other than chaste. His was the appearance of the sort of human male what would likely have little to no idea as to what to in fact do with a human female, if he so happened to cross paths with one. Apart from give her a cup of tea and quiz her about the stock market, or some such thing.

"Please," Crowley snorted, once the 'what could be considered offensive' laughter had died away. "He probably thinks you're her father."

"Actually, I was more going for rich, super dapper, sugar daddy." Alice said, raking her fingernails back through her hair; trying not to look as though she wasn't attempting to spy on her ex, even when it was painfully obvious that this was precisely what she was doing.

"Either way, it's got to be wonderfully off-putting." Aziraphale said cheerfully, his smile fluctuating just the slightest as Crowley reached into his left hand trouser pocket (which the angel knew by touch alone to have been empty until now) and retrieved a somewhat crumpled looking pack of cigarettes. He took a smoke from within the silver tinfoil, tossed the packet onto the table and fetched up Alice's lighter (keeping up appearances, of course) with which to light the tip.

He drew deeply on the cigarette, looking all too relieved at the hit he received from the nicotine and tapped ash into the glass tray situated centre table. Took note then of Aziraphale's sour little face, staring back at him.

"Hey. We're _outside._ It's allowed outside." The demon said defensively, realizing, almost precisely as he said it, that the location was not at all the issue. He had promised that he wouldn't smoke around Aziraphale, who was still managing to go strong on his abstinence from cigarettes and who had always struggled in doing so, given his addictive personality.

It was hard enough as it was; there were already a number of people partaking in the outdoor area. Even just _seeing_ a cigarette brought the desire back strongly to the forefront of Aziraphale's senses.

He had spent many a happy time with a cigarette in hand in the past.

He and Crowley had in fact, wiled away any number of days, afternoons and evenings over a shared smoke or two. Or three or four. Sometimes more, depending on whether they might have been drinking at the same time. Which was... well, _always._

The entire outdoor area was suffused with the seductive scent of burning tobacco. It swirled about Aziraphale, tugging at his metaphorical coat tails, like a demanding child in want of another butterscotch...

He whiffed the air, groaned deeply.

And felt suddenly and absolutely ridiculous.

"Give it here." He said, reaching out across the table and snapping his fingers at Crowley. He did so again, for the demon looked every bit as prepared to throw himself backwards in a bid to remove himself from the angel's clutches. "Just... give it here. Please."

There was something in Aziraphale's tone which suggested to Crowley that this was a demand with which he had little place to argue. Ignoring the very amused looks that his work colleagues were throwing his way, the demon sighed, turned the cigarette about so that the filter was facing towards Aziraphale and permitted the angel to remove it from his grip.

To his surprise, Aziraphale did not in fact grind the cigarette out, but proceeded to bring it to his own lips, where he drew in deeply from the contents of the still smouldering shaft.

It was as though a cooling breeze had washed through Aziraphale's mind. The near constantly nagging and screaming voices what besieged the far corners of his thoughts were at long last set to rest, tucked in under soft blankets of comforting nicotine, nail polish remover and whatever other addictive, wanting poisons lay betwixt the innocuous looking coffin nail.

He tilted his head back, breathed out the toxic fume of vapours with a sigh what leveraged out every habitually tense muscle in his body and closed his eyes. Oh, he had forgotten how very good that had felt. Quite as delicious as the partaking of a piece of delicious fudge. He took another deep drag, dispelled the backdraft up into the air above his head, as though emulating a volcano giving its pre-emptive, subterranean belches.

One of Crowley's brows rose in the corner and continued to rise until it formed into a near perfect question mark upon his face.

"Um..." He murmured, watching as Aziraphale continued to partake of the cigarette with the same pleasure he might have ascribed to a three course meal at a five star eatery. "You um... sure you wanna be... doing that...?"

"Well, you know..." Aziraphale said, in a tone far the more casual than what the demon was accustomed, as he flicked ash into the glass tray centre table. "Life is short. Figure I've spent far too long saying 'no' to the things that I really want." He shrugged, set his tongue to the tip of the filter as he aligned it, altogether meaningfully, with the corner of his lips. "The way I see it? Fuck it."

Crowley almost fell right on out of his seat and managed only to remain upright by virtue of the fact that Aziraphale's statement had rendered him rock solid.

In all their six thousand years spent together, he had never before heard the angel use the word 'fuck'. It was right up there with 'cunt' and he knew that if Aziraphale were ever to come out with this one, that it would probably discorporate him on the spot.

_Those cerebral failsafe's must have been holding him back in any number of ways,_ Crowley reasoned, watching as Aziraphale took another puff from the cigarette, looking far the more at ease with his decision than the demon had ever supposed he might be. _This could be very interesting indeed._

_'Fuck it'._

Crowley rolled the words around in his head. _'Fuck it'._

_'Fuck it'._

It shouldn't have made him feel quite as turned on as it did. But Aziraphale hardly ever swore. He was far too much a class act, far too angelic to indulge the predominantly emotional desire to render things down to such a base and primitive means of conveyance.

Crowley would have loved to have heard the word whispered into his ear, during a moment in which they were very much alone and engaged in activities of which 'fuck' could most certainly be employed as an accurate descriptive.

Maybe now, such things were possible.

"Well..." The demon mused, very the much intrigued as he took another cigarette from the pack upon the table and lit it. "And here I thought the evening was _done_ with surprising me. Feel like I should make a toast, but I haven't even gotten us any drinks yet."

"Oh, it's all good. We got a pitcher. And some spare glasses for when you guys arrived." Jeanie reached over and took up a pair of ten ounce glasses from centre table and spun them about to perch upon their bases.

"What you girls drinking?" Crowley asked, though it seemed altogether very obvious, looking at the amber, frothy headed concoction what currently resided within the jug.

"Beer." Chloe confirmed, sipping from her own glass as she leaned back against the wooden railings behind her. A couple of men from the table nearby took notice of her change in posture. Hardly surprising, given the weather and the slight, white singlet tee that her breasts were currently pushing out the front of. "Some sort of German wheat thing. There was a picture of a guy in lederhosen on the tap."

"Sounds good." Aziraphale said, almost knocking Crowley's legs out from underneath him for the second time in so many minutes. "And you know what? I shall buy the next round."

Crowley blinked torpidly as Jeanie poured beer into the waiting ten ounce glasses. He had rather expected Aziraphale to direct him up to the bar with some manner of drink order which did not include the presence of barley and hops. Aziraphale had never been much a fan of beer and had quite the extensive list of reasons as to why; bloating, insubstantial flavour, too foamy, too hoppy, bad aftertaste, bad taste in general, poor sipping quality, the fact that it wasn't wine, the fact that it wasn't single malt, the fact that it was _beer_ , the list went on and on.

German wheat beer, in particular, Aziraphale often drew exceptional offense with. Likely for the fact that he had been double-crossed by and almost killed by Germans in the previous century and still hadn't quite gotten around to forgiving the Motherland for the transgressions of some of their archaic offspring.

Aziraphale could see that Crowley was very confused by his sudden dramatic turn-about play on most every one of his sensibilities and smiled warmly in an attempt to assuage him. _This night,_ he wanted to say, _has started out so terribly poorly. And what we have learned has helped me to realize that what time we have is ever so precious. I want to soak in as much enjoyment as I am able, in whatever time it is that we have left. Treasure every rare and perfect drop of it._

_Take what is offered in hand and indulge it._

Crowley seemed to interpret Aziraphale's meaning from the look upon his face and made the decision to simply go along with what it was the angel decided. It was hardly a demon's place to worry about the consequences ahead of time and if Aziraphale wanted to loosen the knot in his metaphorical tie for once in his six-thousand years of being rather the stuffy and uptight and ostentatious, then power to him.

"In that case," Crowley said, raising his glass (in which the foamy head was rather the far too much overrepresented) "To taking what you want."

"Amen to that." Chloe said and the group joyfully 'cheersed' the sentiment, drank deep from their glasses, before evoking then any number of equally complimentary reasons as to raise a toast. From Jeanie having a baby free evening, to Chloe and Alice still being single, to the fact that no one had as of yet sat on the bench what would have put them within 'bums brushing' distance of Crowley and Jeanie; all things what were considered, of a Saturday night with booze to fuel its ever the more ludicrous tanks, each just as important as the next.

* * *

**~X~**


	48. Or, in which an angel shifts.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Yeah." Crowley agreed, continuing to look at Aziraphale, wondering just how much he could interpret from the eyes of a demon what were hidden behind the smoky lenses of his glasses.
> 
> He wanted to go home. Back to his place, back to the bookshop, back to the backseat of his car, wherever.
> 
> Any of these places would be fine. So long as they could be there alone together. Alone, where it was their hands and lips and skin what was doing the talking. Where clothes had no such place intruding.
> 
> He wanted to make love.
> 
> Fiercely.
> 
> More than he could ever remember wanting to before...

**~X~**

* * *

Aziraphale learnt a lot about women that evening. He learnt about the woes, the trials and tribulations of dating in the greater area of London. He learnt that he and Crowley were there, not only on the stipulations of theirs being enjoyable company, but also for the fact that they were to run, as the girls referred to it as: 'interference'. This meant that they were intended, by virtue of their presence alone, to keep undesirable suitors at bay, so that the girls could enjoy their drinks in relative peace and quiet, without the added inconvenience of having to chat to new people.

This did, apparently, happen quite a bit; in spite of the women's insistence that they would prefer to simply be left alone on particular evenings out. Even to Jeanie, who reported that she often got hit on by men, who would then feel the need to provide a commentary as to her sexual orientation. Often along the backhanded lines of: _'You're a lesbian, I wouldn't have guessed!'_ To which she would reply to the approximation of, _'Because, what? All lesbians have to look like a Pitbull what was unsatisfied by a day unspent in the mauling of lesser mammals?'_

It sounded exhausting, to Aziraphale. He'd had something of a glimpse into this world after assuming Crowley's form for the first half of the evening and was rather the more pleased that it did not heavily factor into his own lived experience.

It had never really been a concern for him. Oh, certainly, it had happened. But it had happened, for the most part in the context of distant history. Current trends of what was considered to be sexually appealing had taken a dramatic shift in the last couple of centuries alone. And because Aziraphale did not naturally exude this matter of energy, he supposed he had simply rendered himself more the naturally exempt from it.

He might have said the same for Crowley, but then the demon, for whatever his personality might otherwise have suggested, did go to the effort of attempting to blend in. And he did possess something of a natural appeal; something which circumvented his more often than not, objectionable personality.

It was an appeal what was plainly obvious to Aziraphale. He could see it, could barely take his eyes off of it, in fact, when Crowley took some cash off of him and swanned to the garden bar to spring for the next jug of beer for the table.

"Damn, the boys got a nice bum." Alice said, to which the other girls voiced various alliterations of agreement. "Don't know how the fuck he's wearing those pants in this weather though."

"He's determined." Aziraphale stated, draining the last dreg of beer from the bottom of his glass. He had gone very quickly from feeling lightly buzzed, to the verge of 'offensively drunk' in relatively short order. He supposed the cigarette had not at all helped matters. He'd sucked it in quickly and this was after so many decades of not being so much as within spitting distance of one.

He watched as Crowley sidled up to the bar, leaning his forearms on it whilst waiting for the attendant to take notice of him. He really did have a nice bum, Aziraphale observed and felt something in the way of pride for the fact that other people had taken notice of it.

Which seemed to him an odd thing, for it was not his own bottom that was the recipient of the praise but that of the creature to which he might refer to as lover.

It was as though... Crowley's praise was his praise, somehow.

As though it reflected positively on Aziraphale for his having managed to attain something that other people clearly perceived as having some worth.

Aziraphale felt rather startled by the thought. Yes, he realized. That was the rub. The very idea, for the most part unconscious until he thought to examine it. That Crowley could drift into a room, evoke desire from any said individuals within that room and then leave instead with Aziraphale was somehow... deeply satisfying.

The knowing that they could _look_ at him, _want_ him but it was Aziraphale alone who could...

_-have him._

The thought was so deeply erotic and so intensely human that it staggered the Principality. But staggered him in the best means possible. Rather than be appalled by the thought, he was excited by it.

"All the crotch sweat that must build up in them... It'd be like soup in there." Jeanie leaned across the table and gave Aziraphale a jovial cuff to the arm, breaking him smartly out of the labyrinth of his thoughts. "Still, makes it easier to slide 'em off, am I right?"

Though Aziraphale had been entertaining thoughts very much in line with what Jeanie was suggesting, he did not in fact have an answer to give. He had never actually taken Crowley's pants off before and had no idea as to whether cumulative 'crotch sweat' would in any way ease the process.

"I ah..." He cleared his throat, resisting the urge to pick his coaster off of the table and fan his face and neck with it. That would be far too obvious a concession of his embarrassment, however. "I suppose."

"Don't embarrass him, Jen." Alice scolded, crushing the remainder of her cigarette into the glass ashtray. "He's got manners, unlike Cumquat."

"Sorry mate," Jeanie said, with a genuinely apologetic looking smile. "Missus always says I let my mouth run away from me."

"Oh no, it's fine. Nothing to apologize for."

Chloe took up the jug from centre table and poured what tiny dribble of beer remained into her glass, looking back towards the bar hopefully as some means of gauging how far away the next one was. It seemed as though Crowley was currently waylaid by an older woman, whose face hardly looked to be moving under duress of the large amount of Botox injected into it. Though if the whites of her eyes were anything to go by, she was clearly on the hunt. Her long, magenta coloured talons were clasped about the demons inside elbow like a dutiful falcon attending to the leather glove of their handler.

Crowley, for his part, looked every bit as startled as the mouse that was about to become said falcon's dinner and he stared desperately back towards the table in a clear appeal for rescue. The girls naturally ignored him, because watching Cumquat trying to extract himself from an awkward situation was always terribly good fun and Aziraphale had not yet turned about in his seat so as to take notice of the demon's plight.

"So, Alex, Cumquat was telling us you used to be in the army." Chloe said, sipping from her glass as 'Cumquat' silently screamed for help in the background. "What was that like?"

Aziraphale sat there blinking in response to the statement. Wondering if he had in fact heard correctly. "He said I was in the... what?"

"The army?" Chloe looked at the other two girls, not trusting her own memory now. "He said army, right?"

"Military." Alice confirmed, checking something on her phone before slipping it back into her overzealously, oversized handbag. "I think we just assumed he meant the British armed forces."

Aziraphale finally cottoned on. Of course _._ Crowley had clearly been referencing Aziraphale's installation in the Heaven based militia by drawing on an earthly comparison. "Oh. No, I mean. Yes. Yes, I was in the army. Quite some time, actually."

Aziraphale could not in fact remember a time in which he had not been a member of the armed forces. Upon his creation he had been, much as with any other angel, relegated to the organization for which he had been designed and had commenced training right there on the spot. There hadn't been any other path for him to explore, no other alternative options provided. Military based angels did, in fact, have far less autonomy than any other angel of Heaven. Theirs was considered to be the most important work of all.

"Cumquat said you were in the parachute regiment." Jeanie added, to which Aziraphale could only thank whoever there was to thank that he did not have anything in his mouth at the time of hearing this. Otherwise he might have generously spurted it out all over the faces of the poor humans seated in his vicinity.

"Of course he did..." The angel drawled, certain that Crowley found the thought of a pudgy angel like Aziraphale hurling himself out of a plane and floating about on a parachute to be a frightfully amusing one.

He tried to think about what the closest human military equivalent was to the position he held whilst serving in the Heaven militia. Before the time of his dishonourable discharge, he had in fact held the position of a Second Tier General; with command of a platoon what composed seven-hundred celestial soldiers (or six sub-units).

He supposed it sounded very grand, but he never truly considered it to have been much of an accomplishment. Until his installation on earth, the military was all he had known. It had been a simple thing, to follow instructions. And the more 'do-this' and 'do-that' he obligingly attended to, the more he systematically rose through the ranks.

He had been a good soldier. A dutiful one. A straight shooter.

He hadn't stepped a foot out of line, not in all those two thousand years of duty prior to the Garden.

The sword had been the first of what turned out to be any number of decisions he had started to make for himself.

When the walls come away, and all...

"I actually served as a Captain towards the end of my service." Aziraphale said, which, from what he could remember, seemed a reasonable equivalent for a human who might have only served a relatively modest stint in the armed forces. "And, in spite of what Anthony would have you believe, I was not always this size. There was a time when my jumping out of aeroplane would not nearly have been so amusing."

The girls laughed at this, continuing to ignore the quickly escalating hostage situation what was occurring by the bar.

"Did you ever go to any active war zones?" Jeanie asked, pulling her long tangles of brown hair away from her face and working it into some manner of side braid.

"Some." Aziraphale said, which wasn't altogether a lie. The only war zone of which any angel had ever seen was the Rebellion itself. And the lesser thought about that one, the better. "Seen a lot of places around the world in the line of duty. Never actually killed anyone though. Thank goodness." He added, very the much meaning it as he raised his beer and took another sip from it.

"Is that where you and Cumquat met? When you were serving?"

Aziraphale near again snorted beer out of his nose. Had Crowley actually tried to get these girls to believe that he himself had been employed by the armed forces? The idea of Crowley wielding anything the more threatening than a sharp tongue and a stiff drink was a patently absurd one.

"Actually... we met in a garden." He said, surprised that for all Crowley's time spent with these women, that he hadn't fashioned up some story as to how the two of them had become acquainted. "I was doing some... work there at the time and uh... Anthony was... stealing apples."

Well, it wasn't altogether true, but what was he supposed to say? That he had been on apple tree duty in the Garden of Eden and Crowley had slithered up from Hell in the form of a snake and managed to bend the ear of the first woman, enticing her to commit the original sin? Tell that story and he would more the likely find himself strapped to a rubber bed in the closed ward of the psychiatric department.

"How old was he at the time?" Alice asked with a frown, seeming to be having some trouble working out the maths in her head.

"Old enough to know better." Aziraphale said with a chuckle, staring at the bubbles in his beer as they wound their way up to the surface. "We were young. The orchard belonged to my... mother, in fact." He supposed it was not so far the removed from reality. "Anthony sort of lived on the... other side of the garden. One day he just... swanned on in and started causing all sorts of trouble."

He could see that the girls were sort of accepting this as being a meeting that might have happened when the believed to be 'Alex' and 'Anthony' were perhaps children. Which again, was hardly at all far from the truth; given the longevity of angels and demons in general.

"And you gave him a right old thrashing?" Jeanie asked, with a somewhat the hopeful smile.

"He got a very strongly worded telling off, I can assure you."

"And then you fell in love."

"Well, not right away." Aziraphale said, turning to look upwards at Crowley fondly as the demon finally made his long awaited return to the table. His hair was ruffled, as though he had been combing his fingers back through it or some such thing. "After that, he proceeded to chase after me for years on end."

"What the Hea-Hell are you talking about?" Crowley asked, sounding very grumpy as he slumped down heavily onto the bench, almost banging the full jug of beer right on through the slats of the table. "And by the way; thanks a lot for the help!"

"I was telling the story about how we first met." Aziraphale replied, frowning at the wayward mess of Crowley's hair. You could not even see where he usually parted it. "And what do you mean 'help?'"

"Soccer Mum." Chloe explained, tapping Aziraphale on the elbow and then gesturing towards the bar. He turned in his seat, catching sight of a heavily made up woman with bright blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing clothing which suggested she might have been about to go for a night-time jog but more the likely wasn't, given that she was also slathered in a full face of makeup. "She's the broad whose been chasin' Cumquat the last couple of months." She snorted ironically as she lifted the pitcher from centre table and started topping up everybody's glasses. "All that plastic surgery she's had must have shorted out her gaydar."

"Definitely had fillers." Jeanie added thoughtfully, pressing her fingers to her upper and lower lip and peeling them down so that they looked artificially and unattractively larger.

"Hey, whatever gets you through the day." Alice said fairly. "Her money, her choice. So long as she keeps those choices away from our bitter old fruit, who cares?"

"What is she wearing?" Chloe persisted still with the physical deconstructing, squinting over towards the bar as though peering down the sights of a sniper rifle. 'Soccer mum' Aziraphale noticed, did in fact keep casting furtive glances in their direction; namely towards Crowley, who looked very much like someone who had just woken up from a night they couldn't remember, in somebody else's home and was about to go carrying their shoes down the street in one hand, all whilst attempting not to throw up all over the side walk.

"I don't know. Not enough." Alice was starting to look very concerned by the situation and clambered up, gesturing across the table to Crowley. "Maybe we'd better swap seats." She snapped her fingers. "Better yet, come sit on Alex's lap. That'll make her think twice before swanning over here and sweating her fake tan all over the table."

"Wouldn't do much good." Chloe grinned. "The babe's so dense, Cumquat could have his hand down Alex's pants and she still wouldn't get the hint."

"Always worth a try." Crowley said with a shrug, squiggling up out of his seat and moving around to the other side of the table. Aziraphale held a finger out in warning.

"No, its not. Don't even think about it." He advised, as Crowley eased down in the seat beside him and made a big deal then of putting his arm about Aziraphale's shoulders.

"Hey. You go through the hair ruffling I just went through, and you'll be amazed at what you would do." Crowley tilted back his head, draining his newly filled glass in four solid glugs before reaching for the pitcher and topping up. Aziraphale raised a brow at him as, in the background, Soccer Mum took to re-evaluating her life choices.

"Is there a competition that I missed? You don't need to drink that fast. You know beer makes you silly. And bloated."

"You might rip a hole in your pants." Alice said, with a sly wink. "Then there'll be no keeping soccer Mum away from you."

Crowley cleared his throat, obviously still feeling very uncomfortable from Aziraphale's earlier imbibing. He eased up his belt a notch before then turning his attention to Jeanie.

"So, you got yourself a bairn free evening, Jen?"

"Aye. Elise's watching her so that this mama can catch up with her crew." Jeanie took another sip from her beer and rounded it off with a gulp from her water glass. Given that she had been off the alcohol for over nine months, she was finding that even just the one standard drink was enough to knock the legs out from under her. She was pacing herself.

"You bouncin' back okay?"

"Could ask you the same thing." Jeanie chuckled, giving her nose a teasing scrunch. "The girls already clued me in about your little 'waxing mishap'."

Crowley sighed. "Of course they did..."

"Hey. It's not like _you_ tried to keep it a secret." Alice reminded him, taking a tube of lipstick from somewhere in the side pocket of her bag and using it to freshen up. "Besides... I think the real victim of the story is poor Alex here. After what you went and put him through."

"... Alex, is fine." Crowley said, sardonically. "Alex laughed himself silly over the whole thing."

"He did." Aziraphale thought back to the aforementioned waxing mishap, which saw Crowley bent in double over his bathroom bench, biting his dressing gown cord and flinching as Aziraphale was required to rip a waxing strip from between the cheeks of his bottom. He chortled, still as amused by the memory as ever. "Alex is still laughing."

"Whatever. I may have a bruise the size of an avocado but I'm as smooth back there as a Crenshaw melon." Crowley glanced a hand off of the side of his hip as some indication of his backside. Jeanie quirked her brows at him.

"Hey. Try pushing a baby out of your genitals and then you can whine to me about bruising."

Crowley, who had taken to rubbing the side of his dew bespectacled glass against his chest, shuddered at the very thought of what giving birth would entail. "No thanks. Leave that to much braver people than I, ma'am." He gave a soft sigh as the cool of the glass passed over his heated flesh. It was the kind of sigh what might have gotten him a part in one of those late night television shows that he was so frightened about.

Aziraphale, not nearly as ignorant of the sensuality of the act as he might once have been, felt a strong need to prevent Crowley from unintentionally exhibitioning himself. "My dear, at the risk of asking a stupid question, why are you rubbing that glass all over your chest hair?"

"Because it's so fecking hot." Crowley groaned, undoing yet another button so that he could drop the glass down lower on his chest. Condensation clung to his skin and the hair of his chest alike. Some women at a nearby table were starting to take interest. None of Crowley's workmates looked in any way enticed.

"Then take off your stupid fecking leather pants, ya dumb twat." Alice kindly suggested, who, as an ode to her complete and utter lack of interest in Crowley's near disrobement, looked to be checking her messages on her phone.

"Seriously sweetie, you need to ease up on that or Soccer Mum's gonna be on you like a seagull on a hot chip." Jeanie said, grinning as she added: "And with about the same level of squawking, too."

This was quite enough to pull Crowley up short and he quickly rebuttoned almost all the way back up to his chin and returned his glass to the tabletop. Chloe, chuckling at the display, picked up her phone as the screen flashed with a message and groaned at what it was she was met with.

"Oh, for fucks sake..."

"What?" Crowley asked, in the midst of attempting to manually straighten the part in his hair, with Aziraphale's somewhat counterproductive assistance. It had been so much easier in the days when the snapping of fingers was enough to put everything to rights.

"That guy I told you about? The one I've been chatting to on Bumble? Look what the stupid shit's just gone and sent me." She turned the phone about to show Crowley a photograph of an erect penis in the midst of being enthusiastically stroked. An image what resulted in the demon recoiling in his seat with much the same level of shock and drama as when he had been shot by a paint ball in the days leading up to the Armage-Don't-even-bother.

"I don't wanna see that! YUCK!" He near about slapped the offending phone out of Chloe's hand but he didn't want to risk getting any closer to the repulsive picture than necessary.

"I'm afraid I can't see," Aziraphale said politely, reaching into his vest pocket. "Let me just get my reading glasses-"

"You don't need to see!" Crowley snapped, waving urgently for the phone to be removed before Aziraphale could get a proper look at its disgusting contents. "Chloe, would you _warn_ people before you just start... flashing photos of your random roots dicks all over the place?! I could have been eating!"

"How are you such a prude?" Chloe said, retracting the phone as Jeanie and Alice descended into appreciative peals of laughter. "Hardly the first time _you've_ seen one, after all."

"That's...not the point! The point is, I don't need to see the junk of some bloke I don't even know!"

Crowley knew that he was coming off as a little defensive. But he couldn't help it. There was a worlds difference between seeming confident and being... well, tacky was the only word what came to mind. And too often people made the mistake of confusing these two very disparate states as acting in concerto where Crowley was concerned.

He may have been around a long time, but this ought not have suggested that he was particularly 'worldly' when it came to certain aspects of the human experience. Sex, for one, was an area in which he could not help but feel bashful. He'd run across it more times than he could count in his six thousand years, but was always the first to turn around and march out of wherever said sex might have been occurring, with his hands shielding the sides of his face as a preventative measure.

Being self-assured, a smooth talker and a fancy dresser was not congruent with sexual complacency. Yes, he might have very much anticipated his experiencing of such things with Aziraphale, but he was ever the more convinced that there was something to be said in regards to preserving the... privacy of particular things.

How could any of it ever be considered special otherwise?

Aziraphale's eyes widened as the pieces snapped into place. "Wait, are you... did that gentleman with whom you have been speaking... did he send you a picture of his..." He lowered his voice, a particularly scandalized expression forming on his face as he hunched down low as though trading state secrets across the tabletop. "His genitals?"

"Oh, honey, guys do it all the time." Alice said, giving a careless, convivial wave of her hand. "Straight guys anyway, not sure what your lot do."

"Not that!" Crowley exclaimed, still looking humorously appalled by the vulgar image. He wondered just how many more of his senses may in fact be assaulted before the evening was out and was starting to question as to whether beer would be anywhere near strong enough so as to deal with any of it.

Aziraphale, as opposed to sharing in his lovers rather obvious show of maligned disconcertment, frowned in a contrarily thoughtful manner. "I don't understand what the point of such a thing would be." He stated, almost congenially. "Why, it's bad enough that Anthony has a picture of me eating that he drags out for everyone to look at. I hardly think he requires one of my genitals with which to occupy his idle hours."

Crowley flinched violently in support of this; most of his face disappearing into the column of his neck, such was his offense at the thought. What the Heaven was he supposed to have done with a picture of a penis? Stare at it? He didn't even like staring at his own.

"Just block the guy." He muttered, draining about half his glass of beer and wishing very much now for something incrementally stronger. "Ghost him, whatever it is you kids do these days."

"I don't know..." Chloe turned her phone from side to side with a coy, impish smile. "It's a pretty big dick."

"What the Hea- Hell does _that_ matter?" Crowley brought his glass down hard enough against the table that it would hardly have been surprising to have seen cracks splinter up from the base of it. "Who gives a shit? Alex has a massive cock but you don't see him taking pictures of it and sending it to random people!"

He hadn't meant to say it. He was drunk and it had slipped out, as things so often did when he had a mood and a buzz on. The fact that he had managed to use Aziraphale's human name was some small miracle in and of itself. Though this was clearly far from being enough so as to appease an angel, who looked very much fit to be tied. And not at all in a fun way.

"Oh, Crowley, please!" Aziraphale snapped, slapping the back of his hand so hard against the demon's solar plexus that it just about buckled him in half like a pizza box. Crowley supposed, given how just how embarrassed he likely was, that he was getting off easy.

It surprised Crowley that such a thing had even come to mind; regardless of just how drunken said mind actually was. He didn't spend his idle hours thinking about Aziraphale's penis; never the mind as to what size it actually was. He thought about it sometimes when he was masturbating, true. But that was mainly as to how it might have felt inside of him the first time they made love, as opposed to how it looked, in general.

And yes, on these occasions, he had got to wondering as to whether or not it might have been a little painful. So far as Crowley could tell, Aziraphale was not what he supposed humans might refer to as 'prolifically' endowed, but he was certainly much larger than what he understood the 'average' to have been.

Crowley was only aware of such things, because he had spent far too long himself, working out what he felt was the appropriate genital size for his own male type body. He had eventually settled on just an inch or so above the considered to be 'average' because it was just the right size for him to be able to comfortably tuck into his tight pants and not have anything show. The rest of it, he had not been particularly fazed about.

Apparently, as Chloe had just thoughtfully clarified, penis size was something which could apparently excuse any number of undesirable personality traits. Being a virgin himself, Crowley could not at all understand why. I mean, once the sex was over and done with, you still had to talk to this person, right? And there were only so many ways you could talk about a penis before it got hallow and repetitive.

He could only have imagined what it must have been like and as such firmly believed that it would have been preferable to have sex with someone and not have it feel as though they were attempting to divide you up the middle with a baseball bat. Someone with whom sex could be enjoyable, as relatively pain free as possible (unless a little slap and pinch was your sort of 'scene') and then have a conversation which didn't make you want to shove their face down the garbage disposal unit.

None of the introspection was doing much good in assuaging a particularly offended looking angel, who now appeared to be particularly self-conscious and hyper vigilant where his groin was concerned.

"I'm just pointing out how much more class you have than some random douche canoe who apparently thinks a woman should be 'so blessed' to be graced with a picture of his stupid, ugly, overly veiny penis." Crowley all but purred, attempting to charm his way out of the drunken hole into which he was rather the unremittingly interring himself.

"Did you actually just call Cumquat by his surname?" Alice suddenly chimed in, who did not seem suspicious, so much as curious.

Crowley went back quickly over the exchange in his foggy mind. Shit. Aziraphale _had_ referred to him as Crowley. Though he could hardly have been blamed for the slip, given what had in fact just gone and slipped out of the demon's own mouth. Still, it was something what required some manner of fabricated explanation.

"Oh, yeah... he does that when he's pissed off with me." Crowley brushed his fingers back through Aziraphale's soft locks of white hair, all but leering into the angels face. An angel what simply gave him a very tired look in return. "Used to just call me by my surname back in the old days."

Aziraphale cleared his throat, taking Crowley's hand out from the curls of his hair and returning it to the tabletop; squeezing his fingers gently between his own. "That being said, I agree with Anthony as to how you address matters with this... Bumble-bee friend of yours. What sort of man deems it appropriate to send such a thing to a woman he is attempting to woe? Did the thought of chocolates and flowers never so much as cross his mind?" He shook his head, sighing as he raised his still mostly full beer glass back to his lips. "Honestly, what has happened to romantic courtship these days?"

"It gets swallowed up in the pursuit of sex." Alice contributed, which seemed as fair and as realistic an observation as any.

"But that's absurd." Aziraphale put his glass down without taking a sip. "Sex is something that can be enjoyed by any living thing. When we remove the value we ascribe to the forming of true, loving, magnanimous relationships, there is nothing then which separates us from a gaggle of rutting cats." He seemed somehow the more moved by this assertion than Crowley had seen him in some time. And it seemed to him a very sweet, very significant thing; for Aziraphale to feel so strongly about. "Just erroneously prowling about, grabbing a hold of some, god willing, prospectively consenting partner at random and having your way with them before moving indiscriminately onto the next!" He looked about the table for an ally, chancing looks of understanding and appreciation from Jeanie and Crowley, in particular. "I mean, where is the romance in that?"

"A lot of people aren't looking for romance, chook. That's the thing." Chloe had thankfully returned her phone and its tasteless tableau back into the waiting confines of her handbag. "I'm not looking for a relationship right now. I only got out of a long term one a while back and I was in it for years before the bastard went and cheated on me. Now, well. I'm just looking for some fun. Until I'm ready to get back out there and start looking."

"Besides, looking can be hard. They can't all just land in our laps in an apple orchard, after all." Alice smiled at Aziraphale and Crowley purposefully. "You two got lucky."

Aziraphale snorted. "Hardly. It took a great deal of work to get to where we are now."

"What? You don't think we're lucky?" Crowley asked, a little surprised that an angel would not have derived some pleasure from the association of mystical happenstances of their having been drawn together. An angel, who, had a very specialized, very niche appreciation for books on prophecy, nonetheless.

"I think we're very fortunate to have found one another, yes." Aziraphale clarified, making certain to pay special credence to the word 'fortunate'. "But I don't think _luck_ had much stock in paving the path we trod. We worked at it."

" _I_ worked. _You_ struggled." _Flailed like a jellyfish caught in a tidal pool might be more appropriate a descriptor,_ Crowley thought, a little waspishly.

"I did. I struggled for some time. Sometimes I still struggle. But we're here. And we're very happy, I think." He took up Crowley's hand once more between his own, turned it about so as to squeeze the backs of his fingers into a comforting ball. "Don't you agree?"

It was ever the worse when Aziraphale actually acknowledged his shortcomings, for he had been so routinely guarded in the past. Making concessions was to him admitting that he was not perfect, which meant that the system from which he originated was likewise fallible and when Aziraphale had been a loyal envoy of the Heavenly realm, yielding to such a possibility of it being less than absolutely and incontestably right was simply inconceivable.

By default, it would have been every bit as impossible for his accepting anything Crowley had said or presented him with as being right, or truthful. It flew in the face of the order by which Aziraphale had built his entire life around. Abiding by such universal stipulations was really little different to picking up an instruction manual, starting at the number one and then following on; step by step until the entire entertainment cabinet had been shoddily ram shackled together.

It took away the need to ask questions. To challenge. To challenge himself more to the point.

Crowley could see more clearly into Aziraphale than he had ever done before. As though those towering, concrete walls had at long last been torn down. He felt that when they locked eyes, they truly saw one another, with nothing at long last standing, even invisibly and intangibly between them.

It made him feel weak.

Weak with love.

Weak with desire.

"Yeah." Crowley agreed, continuing to look at Aziraphale, wondering just how much he could interpret from the eyes of a demon what were hidden behind the smoky lenses of his glasses.

He wanted to go home. Back to his place, back to the bookshop, back to the backseat of his car, wherever.

Any of these places would be fine. So long as they could be there alone together. Alone, where it was their hands and lips and skin what was doing the talking. Where clothes had no such place intruding.

He wanted to make love.

Fiercely.

More than he could ever remember wanting to before.

It gripped him like a fever; sending a flush through his features, so intense he thought he could see it bloom outwards over the backs of his hands, through each of his fingers. He wanted to grab Aziraphale now, drag him up and away from the table, and steer him out into the night and all the other possibilities what were in fact only possible once they had left this place behind.

But then there was music playing. And the delicate glass what ever so tenderly encapsulated the moment was shattered with the indecorous striking of those first few cords of what was indisputably and unforgivably, a banjo.

A group of people gathered within one of the furthermost nooks of the courtyard, were engaging in what the Irish would so often refer to as a 'session'. Crowley wasn't familiar with the song that they were playing; only that it was lively, boisterous and entirely unsuited so far as the sustaining of rampant hormones was concerned.

"Oh, I love this one." Jeanie commented, setting her beer down on the table and struggling to her feet. She came around the table, gesturing at Aziraphale. "Hey, Alex? How you feel about squirin' a little lady about the floor?"

There wasn't much to be found in the way of a 'floor', for that wasn't much space set between the outdoor tables. There were a few spaces in which people had gathered, some of whom were swinging one another about with ill-advised enthusiasm, threatening the likes of growlers, pitchers and elbows alike.

Of course, it wasn't the spatial issue with which Aziraphale took exception.

"Oh... as much as I would... love that my dear, I'm afraid I shall have to say no. You see..." He lowered his voice, as though on the cusp of disclosing extremely personal and embarrassing toileting secrets to someone who was not in fact, a registered proctologist. " _I can't actually dance..."_

He had rather expected Jeanie to have made fun of him or indeed challenge his perceived capacity. But instead, she smiled, gave a snort and jerked her thumb at Crowley in reference.

"So? Cumquat can't dance and that doesn't stop him! Even when it really should." She added, pointedly.

Crowley nodded seriously, taking no offence at a statement he knew to be entirely true. "Blessed straight. Besides, you can dance, angel, you can do the gavotte!"

Crowley set his index and middle finger down on the table, emulating a pair of legs that took then to kicking, jumping and pulling off such aerodynamically unfeasible manoeuvres that would never have been seen where the gavotte was concerned; such as the full splits and what looked to be a flying plie.

"What the hell's a gavotte?" Chloe asked, apparently finding Crowley's finger dancing demonstration lacking in a certain descriptive something.

Crowley's fingers melded back into alignment with the rest of their bedfellows and formed a slate what then slapped the table with relish.

"Ha! Now you have to show them."

"I most certainly do not!" Aziraphale snapped, giving Crowley a hard slap on the arm to shut him up. It never worked, of course, but it made the angel feel better, if only momentarily. "Besides, it's been years since I've done it. I'm very much out of practice. And I hardly think that a rowdy public bar is the sort of location one goes rolling such things back out."

Images of drunken hoodlums taking to him with chairs, broken bottles and banjos alike were flashing suddenly through Aziraphale's mind with the sort of clarity what made you suspect that it would not have been the first time. It would seem that the gavotte was the sort of dance what was enjoyed by very elite circles; most of whom would not have been caught dead in a public house.

"Oh, come on!" Alice drawled, reminding Aziraphale all too much of how Crowley would talk when attempting to swing the angel about to his way of thinking. Perhaps all their shared shifts at work were rubbing off on each other? "Besides, everything you do is fucking adorable. If anything people would just be melting in their seats, wishing they could take you home and introduce you to their parents. Like me." She added, with what Aziraphale hoped to have been a purposefully creepy smile.

Crowley struggled up out of his seat with all the ease of an infirm old man trapped in a beanbag. "It's settled. Come on, let's do it." He snapped his fingers at Aziraphale, swaying on the spot. "I'll be your partner."

"You don't even know how to dance it!" Aziraphale protested, which, given the way in which Crowley was shifting unsteadily from foot to foot, was honestly the least of his many, many reservations. He could already envision glasses smashing and tables being flipped over from being on the receiving end of a kick from one of those long, gangly legs.

"I remember a couple of steps." Crowley felt this was a fair achievement, given that his one experience attending a gavotte session was riddled with him trying to keep a progression of increasingly eager men from inserting their hands down the front of his trousers. "You can teach me the rest. You're the one who wanted us to go dancing together."

"Couples dances, not the gavotte!"

Crowley grinned, leaning down to wrap his arms affectionately about Aziraphale's shoulders. Pressing his cheek so hard into the angels, that he near about dislodged his jawbone from the pressure. "You protest, but you love the gavotte. Bet you're just champing at the bit to kick your heels up and get your prance on..."

Crowley's workmates were weighing in on the peer pressure by banging their hands on the table, chanting 'Gavotte, gavotte, gavotte!' People were starting to stare at them and if Aziraphale hadn't been quite as drunk as he had been, this might have otherwise sent him into a shrivelled ball of affiliate embarrassment. But instead, he found himself laughing.

"Absolutely not! No." He managed to ease one of his arms out from underneath Crowley's anaconda like grip and hold a hand out over the table. "Come hell or high water, there is no way that I will be dancing the gavotte here tonight!"

Crowley had never been the sort to shirk from a challenge.

It took a couple of rounds of shots, but fifteen minutes later, one very drunken Principality was made to dine upon his own hat.

And most everyone in the upper terrace, received the rather unique pleasure, of learning a dance what had fallen out of fashion some hundred or so years earlier.

* * *

**~X~**


	49. Or, in which burning feathers are hard to forget.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The undercurrent of lust and greed was strong in the city that night. And perhaps he had simply been spending far too long on earth as a human male, but Gabriel thought that Lord Beelzebub looked far too small, too vulnerable and too.. something else, in that moment. Something which made him want to cross the room and...
> 
> He flexed his fingers, uncertain. What did he want to do?
> 
> He knew of one thing. One thing that once upon a time he would never have hesitated to have done.
> 
> If Aziraphale could...

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 7:36pm~** _   
_**Sunny Sanctum Hotel - London, Mayfair...** _

"Well _that_ could have gone better."

"Not sure how it could have gone much worse." Beelzebub paced the room, lips pressed together tightly, mind buzzing just as loudly as the flies what lingered beneath their corporeal skin. They had returned to the same dingy hotel Gabriel had spent his very first night on earth violently the passed out in. They didn't dare reconvene to the bar in which they had conducted their previous meetings. Too much the risk of being overheard.

"I've sent a message to the others." Gabriel said, slipping his Cele-phone back into his inside pocket before turning and sliding in the deadbolt on the hotel door. He looked particularly frazzled; his usually meticulous hair sticking up to every which way. "Do you think that they saw us?"

"If they did, there'z not much a deadboltz going to be able to do." Beelzebub made a part in the moth eaten curtains and peeped out into the darkness beyond. They were on the third floor, but that meant little when supernatural entities came into play. "We may be panicking needlessly. For all we know, they were there to keep tabz on Aziraphale and Crowley."

"How then do we go about explaining our presence?" Gabriel asked, sitting down on the grubby looking twin bed. The mattress sagged threateningly under his weight and he imagined that if a piece of furniture was capable of sighing, this was precisely what the bed had just gone and done.

"If we get asked, we say that we were simply warning Aziraphale and Crowley from taking any action againzt the Contingency team." Beelzebub said, closing the curtains and pinning the edges together as tightly as they were able. Gabriel stared up at them with protestant like levels of disapproval.

"But that would be a lie."

"Oh, grow up." Beelzebub snapped, having had quite enough of everything by this stage. "In case it failed to escape your attention, archangel, we're NOT in Heaven anymore. No one down here givez a damn about your precious sentiments. All they're going to do iz get you killed. Painfully. And whilzt I would usually be the first to applaud the sight of you being fed face firzt into an automatic wheat thresher, having you rendered down to grade-a fertilizer isn't going to help anyone." They gave him a very firm look which blatantly said that he was not to argue. "If the alternative iz you getting your head lobbed off, you WILL lie, Archangel Gabriel. You will lie with a song in your heart, a smile on your face and you will lie until you are BLUE in said face. Am I making myself clear?"

"Crystal." Gabriel said, wondering if Beelzebub had ever been this scary back in the days before the fall. Surely he would remember this feeling of being so very small and utterly powerless. He fidgeted a moment upon the bed, casting superfluous eyes about the small room. "Is there um... any of that human alcohol in this domicile?"

"Bar fridge, juzt under the sink." Beelzebub had already scoped this out when they had been forced to spend the night watching over Gabriel; less he choke on his own Chardonnay riddled vomit. "Think that'z a good idea after lazt time?"

"Right now I'm fairly certain that I don't give a fig as to whether it is a good idea or not." Gabriel said, wrenching upon the vinyl rendered door beneath the sink to reveal a small bar fridge. A fridge what was decorated with its own small stripe of vinyl; like a soldier what had earned their war paint. "This whole night couldn't have gone any worse. Two of the Vices there, we didn't even get a chance to put our offer across to Aziraphale and Crowley..." Gabriel glanced up from the bar fridge with an expression on his face what made it look like he was on the receiving end of a gourd juice enema. "I mean...did you _see_ them?"

"Course I saw them. I waz standing right next to you, there'z nothing wrong with my eyez."

"And in a public place to boot! I mean, have they no pride?!" Gabriel opened the fridge and frowned, scooping out the tiny bottles of liquor stored within. "Somethings wrong. I remember these being bigger."

"It'z a bar fridge." Beelzebub said, slightly amused by the sight of Gabriel peering down at the bottles with a puzzled look on his face. "They only give you enough for the one drink."

"Well it's all right for YOU, you're tiny! I'll need ten of these just to make one drink for myself."

Beelzebub snorted, unconvinced for obvious reasons. "No, you won't." They crossed the room, took the bottles out of Gabriel's flummoxed hands and gestured for him to return to the bed. "Sit down. I'll whip you something up which hopefully won't end up with you vomiting all over me."

They made Gabriel's drink, using a can of cola, some ice and the small bottle of scotch whiskey they had taken from the bar fridge. They poured for themselves a Tanqueray's gin and tonic, with only the one small cube of ice to its name. They didn't care for watering down their liquor right there and then.

Beelzebub sat at the small dining set by the window. Gabriel remained on the bed. They were quiet a moment whilst they sipped from their drinks. Gabriel crushed some ice between his teeth and winced as the cold worked it's way into his nerves.

"Surprized that it bothers you." Beelzebub said finally. It had been about three minutes. Three long, uncomfortable minutes. "We uzed to kiss back in Heaven. How iz it any different? What they were doing?"

"It's completely different." Gabriel said, not wanting to discuss it. He took another sip from his drink. That good numb feeling was coming back. He needed for it to hurry up.

"How?" Beelzebub challenged. "They obviously care for one another. They've formed a bond. How iz that any different to what you and I shared?"

"Because angels-" Gabriel began and then stopped himself, feeling that this was very much one of those times he ought to keep his mouth shut. Much as was their practice with it however, that Beelzebub knew entirely as to where he had been going with it.

"Because angelz are beingz of love." The demon said, their tone far the more even keeled than Gabriel thought possible. "And because we are your axis, you assume it iz impossible for us to feel love."

"Is it not?" Gabriel asked, rather surprised by the urgency in his tone. A question with which he had long since wrestled, from the time of his first and ostensibly limited understanding of damnation.

"You idiot." Beelzebub said kindly. "You imagine that love haz a direct counterpart, like the Vicez and the Virtuez. I suppose you imagine it must be hate. That we demonz are full of hate."

"And are you?" Gabriel heard an ice cube shift in his drink. It seemed far the louder than it ought to have been.

"Oh, yes." Lord Beelzebub said. "Most exquisite hatred indeed. We writhe in a bed draped in layer upon layer of spite and vengeance and bitterness. Sheets what are made of splinterz and thornz and stonez. Sharp edges of pain what hurt all the more for the fact that love is but the one sensation to which there iz no counterpart. Nothing haz changed so far as our capacity to love is concerned, foolish Archangel. Perhaps we love more intensely," They said, thoughtfully. "For it is we alone whom have touched that darkest void of wretched misery."

Gabriel said nothing. What could he possibly say? He sat there, awash in those very unfamiliar waves of shame with his head down; the image of Raphael's once long, silver hair billowing through his mind like a sail.

"I envy them." Beelzebub said. "I do. They sacrificed everything to be with the one they love. There waz nothing more important, nothing which they weren't prepared to sacrifice. To have lied to us for so long. I would have run Crowley through every device what he developed for use in the Spanish Inquisition if I'd found out. He knew it too. But he still disobeyed us." The gave a twist of their lip, blew air up towards one of the trailing flies legs hanging down over their forehead. "He found something that waz worth the risk."

Gabriel started to ease himself up off of the bed. "If I could just..."

"You know, I remember Aziraphale from back in the old dayz. Just took him for your standard born and bred glad handing sycophant who never said no." Beelzebub looked to Gabriel with bitter, sallow eyes. "Given what I've seen and learned since, it's obvious now, that that Principality haz got more ballzz than all a you bastards combined. The fact that you all look down your nose at him for it, iz disgusting."

"He's not brave." Gabriel stated, confused by the direction the conversation had taken. "He did these things because he's selfish. He put himself and that demon first!"

"Something you could never do." Beelzebub sipped from their drink and turned so as to stare off into the pastel yellow, water marked wallpaper. Their small, round face seemed to have developed corners into which a wedge of bitterness had been slipped; much like a slice of lemon. "I think I want you to go now."

It took a moment for Gabriel to realise he had been dismissed. When he did, he hesitated further so as to drain the last of his drink and set the glass on the bedside table.

"As you wish." He said, heaving himself up off of the bed and straightening each layer of his designer clothing. "I shall be in touch."

He considered it the far the more polite thing, to step out from the room, into the hallway and make his departure then. He did in fact, go ahead to do this very thing, when something stopped him.

The undercurrent of lust and greed was strong in the city that night. And perhaps he had simply been spending far too long on earth as a human male, but Gabriel thought that Lord Beelzebub looked far too small, too vulnerable and too.. something else, in that moment. Something which made him want to cross the room and...

He flexed his fingers, uncertain. What did he want to do?

He knew of one thing. One thing that once upon a time he would never have hesitated to have done.

If Aziraphale could...

Beelzebub turned their head as Gabriel strode back across the room. His tall figure blocked out the light from the single, dim flickering bulb what was barely screwed into the crumbling foundations of the ceiling.

He cupped a hand up underneath their narrow chin, leaned in. Beelzebub's eyes, rather appropriately, bulged and they smacked their palm so hard against the angels mouth that it ratcheted pain up through his front teeth.

"What. The Heaven. Do you think you're doing?" The demon asked, hoping that the answer was somewhere along the lines of 'developing a brain tumour'.

"I was, uh... I was attempting to kiss you." Gabriel said, muffled from behind Beelzebub's' hand.

"Forgive the rather, as the humans would say, _avante garde_ pun I was about to make, but what on earth possessed you?" Beelzebub queried, rather the more amused than they were concerned.

"I miss you." Gabriel said, and there was such vulnerability to it, such genuine strobes of remorse that it actually managed to weaken the iron clad foundations what the Lord of the Infernal regions had bolstered about their soul. "It's my fault. And you're right; I'm a coward. The most terrible coward." He took Beelzebub's' fingers between his own; squeezed them. "There's nothing I can say. The damage is long since done and it is right and proper that I never be forgiven for it. However," he looked into the slate grey of their piercing eyes. "The fact that I miss who you _were_ , should not suggest that I do not care for you as you are now. You are the same soul. I will always love that soul."

"Be quiet." Beelzebub said softly, their eyes darting as though they were a rat caught in a trap. "I am the Lord of the Infernal regions. I will not be undone by false platitudes. Leave."

"Please." Gabriel said, leaning closer still. He set his lips against their cheek and it was as though nothing had changed. "Just permit me to be close to you. Just this one night..."

"You dare..." the Lord Beelzebub was saying. And then, they were drifting. They were drifting in Gabriel's arms as he carried them towards the bed.

Six thousand years of stupidity was a lot to make up for. But the Archangel Gabriel sure as hell meant to give it his best shot.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hello, my darlings :) I know I said that I would get the six updates out on this one evening, but honestly; it is far too big of an ask, considering the amount of time I have at my disposal. 
> 
> As such; I will have the next three updates out tomorrow, the NSFW content out on the 30th and one fresh new chapter available on the 31st. Once more, my apologies, but I do believe that this is likely bombardment enough for anyone's sake and I do need to get some rest so as to get back on top of things.
> 
> Thank you my dears and as always, with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	50. Or, in which a demon foray's.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "No! No, I'm..." Crowley shrugged, feeling very much at odds with expressing himself as he always was. "I'm actually... happier than I can ever remember being."
> 
> "Then why?"
> 
> "Just..." Crowley glanced about, taking stock of the other bar goers and moved in closer, so that he and Aziraphale were barely but an inch apart. The scent of beer and cigarette smoke filtered between them; intermingling with the hint of Aziraphale's cologne, which clung obstinately to his skin in spite of the sweat which attempted to stomp its determined little fingers free. "I thought I might have some on hand... just for... fun. You know?"
> 
> "For... fun." Aziraphale repeated, not understanding. There had been nothing fun, so far as he could tell, from Crowley's first experience with the taking of the stuff.
> 
> The demon continued to struggle. It was painful, sometimes, trying to be subtle with an angel who took everything at face value.
> 
> "You know... fun fun.."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay, I must admit; I am conducting this editing following on from a farewell get together for one of my work colleagues, so it's not as lovely as I hoped for it to have been. That being said; thank you as always to all of you beautiful people who have taken time to kudos, to comment, to read and to support the story in your way! One more update for you and then, tomorrow onwards, some significantly more sexy stuff! xxx ooo

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 9:10pm~** _   
_**The Faltering Fullback - London...** _

"Please stop."

"Just one more," Aziraphale said, beaming as he shuffled the pack of cards he had borrowed from behind the bar and then dividing it into halves. He set each half upon the table, attempting to flick them back together to reform the pack, but due to natural ineptitude and increasing levels of intoxication, succeeded only in flicking cards about all over the place. "They're enjoying it."

This, was of course, debatable. Jeanie and Chloe did indeed seem to be taking some sort of perverse enjoyment in watching Aziraphale drunkenly fumble through his array of magic tricks; but Crowley imagined this was most likely as a result of their catty bickering than the angel being in any way genuinely entertaining. Alice had at some stage extracted herself from what had quickly turned from a willing audience to a hostage situation and was hovering by the bar, chatting with a couple of people she claimed to have recognized. Crowley would not have blamed her for lying, given what she would otherwise have been forced to endure. Which in his mind, was a blatant disregard of the Geneva convention.

"They're not enjoying it, they're just pitying you." Crowley plucked free a card what had suctioned itself to the condensation of his glass and flicked it back towards Aziraphale's flailing hands. "When they should be pitying _me_ because this is what I have to go home with."

"I ought to magic you a sense of humour." Aziraphale grumbled, shuffling the cards a great deal more slowly than before. He never liked it when the demon rained on his parade and there was never a greater downpour than when he tried to show off any of his magic tricks.

"You'll need to magic yourself a new life partner soon, that's what you'll need to be doing." Crowley caught sight of Alice waving to him from the bar, which seemed as good a lifeline as any. "Good timing." He said, struggling up out of his seat before leaning back in to place a kiss against Aziraphale's cheek. "Back in a minute."

"Of course." The angel replied, far the more focused on fanning out the cards so that they were somewhat evenly distributed. When he indicated for one of the girls to select one however, their eyes were instead focused over their shoulders towards the bar.

"She's not... not _again_ , is she?" Jeanie asked, biting worriedly at the corner of her lip.

"Probably. You know her." Chloe turned back towards the table with a careless shrug and picked up her beer. And then, because Jeanie was continuing with looking troubled, added: "Relax. It's only every once in a while. Girls' havin' a rough night and she's not working tomorrow."

"Only takes the once for shit to go south..."

Aziraphale lowered the cards towards the table, aware that the attention of his audience had been well and truly divided. And for what appeared to be a rather worrying reason.

"Is everything all right?"

Chloe and Jeanie had one of those lovely, internal conversations people have where neither was quite certain as to just how much information they ought to be sharing. They spent a few long moments staring at one another awkwardly, 'um-ing' and 'ah-ing' until Jeanie finally decided to bite the bullet and elect herself spokesperson.

She'd never been the best at keeping secrets. Kind of thing they stomped out of you in Catholic school.

"Every once in a while when we're out drinking, Alice likes to... take a couple of uppers." She explained, to which Aziraphale, unfamiliar with the term, responded with a look of abject befuddlement. "Nothing _bad_ bad or anything, just a couple of ecchy's. Have a good time on."

"Ecchy's..." Aziraphale asked, training his inebriated brain back through its admittedly limited collection of modern colloquialisms. Something drifted up from a conversation he'd had with Crowley way back in the 1960's. "As in... ecstasy?"

"Yeah." Jeanie sighed. Though she was in no way responsible for the situation, she still felt the overwhelming need to apologize for it. That damn Catholic guilt at play, once more. "Sorry. We have asked that she not drag Anthony along for the ride, but you know him. Stubborn goat."

Naturally, this newly revealed information was enough to whip Aziraphale's ever the more bleary eyes back towards the bar. He could not for the life of him fathom as to what manner of 'ride' it was that Crowley was being taken on. A demon he may well have been, but Aziraphale believed him whole heartedly when he professed to having never indulged in recreational substances since his work related experimentation back in the sixties.

Which is precisely why Aziraphale found himself so shocked, to see Crowley take a small plastic bag from the man to whom Alice was engaged in conversation with and slip it discretely into the rear pocket of his trousers. It had been done in such a way that a human being would not at all have noticed anything awry. But Aziraphale was attuned to magical energy and despite being rather the more drunk than he had been in quite some years, was able to keep track of the demons hand.

He had never been especially good at concealing his emotions; Crowley had been one hundred percent on the money with that. And he knew full well that his anger would have been perched upon his face about as obviously as a the gloss upon a new silk hat.

All the more difficult, given that he was drunk and his celestial failsafe's were no longer in charge of marshalling the extremities of his mood. He did his best to suck it up, forcing a smile what he was nearly certain Crowley would have been able to see precisely for what it was but banking on the demon being too drunk and too content to check for duplicity.

It seemed to have done the trick. When Alice and Crowley returned to the table, neither the one seemed to take notice of anything being off kilter. Aziraphale was focusing his gaze with patrician like acumen upon the stack of cards; pointlessly shuffling and re-shuffling so that he had no reason as to make eye contact. Anger however, continued to strobe through him, such that his fingers trembled a little as he passed the cards back and forth from hand to hand.

"Assuming I didn't miss much?" Crowley asking ironically, picking up his beer and gulping down the last remaining dregs.

Aziraphale set the cards down, carefully pushing and poking the uneven protruding edges back so that they were in proper alignment.

"Well, that all depends. I have one last trick up my sleeve. Now how does it go again? Oh, yes." He took one hand, gave a theatrical flourish of the wrist and then reached into his sleeve. Unseen by the others, he snapped his fingers, conjuring up the plastic baggie what was, until seconds earlier, interred within Crowley's back pocket. He slid it out into plain sight, allowing it to dangle from between his fingertips. The contents; two small pink tablets with a indeterminable logo stamped into the side, had nestled themselves into the lower left hand corner like a pair of lovebirds in a cosy nest. "Ah. Now where on earth could _that_ have come from, I wonder?"

Crowley's eyes widened behind his glasses and he reached across in an attempt to snatch the bag away. Aziraphale, reflexes hardly the least diminished by the amount he had drunk, snapped his remaining fingers about the bag to form a protective cacoon and then dropped his hand to the table; keeping the bag out of sight.

Chloe, mouth hanging open wide in evidence of her astonishment, raised both hands to either side of her head. "Okay. I have _no_ idea how he did that." She said and wondered whether applause might be appropriate. Given the gnarly looks on the men's faces however, she presumed, accurately, that it was not.

"It's nothing." Crowley said, wondering why he ever bothered levelling half-arsed defences like this at Aziraphale. They had been around long enough to be cleverer than this; offering the same manner of excuse an adolescent might trot out when being questioned by an overly concerned parent.

"Nothing, is it? Because it looks very much to me like two ecstasy tablets." Crowley had turned his face away, making a point now of avoiding Aziraphale's disappointment laden gaze. "Cr-" He cleared his throat. " _Anthony,_ we've talked about this. You know how they affected you last time."

The last time being the 1960's. Where Crowley, under the potent throes of very high grade ecstasy, had all but dry humped Aziraphale through one of his bookshelves and then (upon failing spectacularly at receiving any sort of reciprocal gratification) had masturbated so furiously in the shower that it had resulted in the penis he'd had, at the time, being decommissioned the very next day.

He had blisters on his thumb to boot.

"The time you're thinking of," Crowley began, with as much dignity as a demon might maintain when looking directly into the eyes of a person who had witnessed you at your most embarrassing, "I took two of the things in one go. I've gotten better at it since then."

Aziraphale's anger, what had been simmering until now, was quickly reaching boiling point. He drew up in his chair, much like the Egyptian asps back in the temple of the Vices and Virtues and with, it would seem, every much the same intention to bite.

"And you do this often enough to have _practice_ at it?"

Alice looked ever the more miserable for effectively triggering off their argument. She was incredibly fond of both 'Anthony' and 'Alex' and the very thought that she might have inadvertently set them on a path what might lead to them once more to 'breaking up' was a terrible one.

"Look, I shouldn't have-"

"You don't need to apologize, you haven't done anything wrong." Crowley said firmly, raising a hand and pointing off towards the stairwell. There was enough room at the outcrop for two people to be able to stand and not be in the way of those coming and going. "Can we have this conversation elsewhere?"

"Fine." Aziraphale said, dragging himself up out of his seat and slipping the little baggie into his vest pocket as an afterthought. He walked on ahead of Crowley towards the stairwell - well, muddled his way, might have in fact been more appropriate. It took the standing up for him to realize quite how drunk he had permitted himself to get.

_Shots,_ he thought. _What on earth was I thinking? Who throws back alcohol without even savouring the taste? And here I was supposing myself to have honed standards what were far the more prestigious than that._

He stood by the corner rail, leaning mostly back on it whenever he took to swaying. It comforted him to see that Crowley really wasn't much better. He jostled from one foot to the next as though he were in desperate need of the facilities. Perhaps he was. There had been a great deal of alcohol having only gone in the one direction, thus far.

"I just... I don't understand why you would feel the need to indulge this sort of thing." Aziraphale petted his hand to his breast pocket, in evidence of what said 'thing' was. He imagined that he was keeping his voice down, but he noticed a couple of heads at the table nearest them glancing their way. "Back in the sixties you said that it hardly did anything for you."

Crowley looked altogether too much like a high school boy what had been called in by his Principal for a dressing down. The hands partway wedged into his front pockets, pinkie fingers typically eschew, only added to the resemblance.

"Well... I didn't actually _mind_ how the ecstasy made me feel."

_"You almost dry humped me through a bookshelf!"_ Aziraphale hissed and then, upon seeing the slow, sneaky smile draw itself across Crowley's lower face, felt the penny finally drop. "Oh. ... I'm supposing that is _precisely_ why you enjoyed it."

Crowley continued to grin as Aziraphale eased a hand back through his hair and then thought the better of it; snapping his arm back down quickly against his side. The night was still a warm one and in spite of the approximate half can of clinical anti-perspirant he had sprayed onto his armpits, he had still managed to work out some considerable sweat marks.

"Is this only a recent thing?" He asked, wasting a little magic by waving away the nasty looking patches what had formed on his shirt. He could hardly go about with relaxing when he was so aware of them. "Or have you always?"

"No, not always. Just... the once or twice while we were... you know, taking a break. I was feeling pretty rotten inside and this stuff... it just... helped me feel better for a while. I didn't actually _do_ anything while I was on it."

"But why now? Surely you're not still having those sorts of low feelings, are you?"

"No! No, I'm..." Crowley shrugged, feeling very much at odds with expressing himself as he always was. "I'm actually... happier than I can ever remember being."

"Then why?"

"Just..." Crowley glanced about, taking stock of the other bar goers and moved in closer, so that he and Aziraphale were barely but an inch apart. The scent of beer and cigarette smoke filtered between them; intermingling with the hint of Aziraphale's cologne, which clung obstinately to his skin in spite of the sweat which attempted to stomp its determined little fingers free. "I thought I might have some on hand... just for... fun. You know?"

"For... fun." Aziraphale repeated, not understanding. There had been nothing fun, so far as he could tell, from Crowley's first experience with the taking of the stuff.

The demon continued to struggle. It was painful, sometimes, trying to be subtle with an angel who took everything at face value.

"You know... _fun fun_."

"Fun-fun?" Aziraphale asked, frowning like a small child who was well shot of the ever the more confusing flash cards that their parent insisted on jamming into their face over and over again. Crowley, such as he was accustomed in the past six thousand years, realized he was, as usual, going to have to be very blunt.

"Sex fun." He stopped just short of using finger puppets to demonstrate to Aziraphale what sex was. Which wasn't easy, given that the angel was still doing a very good impression of not being in possession of a functioning brain cell. "Look, it's... it's not the sort of thing I feel comfortable going into but..." He glanced over his shoulder, moved another inch closer and lowered his voice further still. He was blushing, Aziraphale realized and wondered just how few the times were, in which he had actually witnessed such a thing. "One night, at home, when we weren't... I uh..." He twitched his head to the side meaningfully, really hoping that this was not the sort of thing he needed to explain in detail. "Only with _myself,_ you know... I mean, who else, right? But it..." Aziraphale continued to peer shrewdly at him, as though attempting to decipher a foreign language right on the cusp of it being spoken. "... the uh... the physical stuff it... it's kind of... insane."

Aziraphale might have been the sort of creature who found wishy-washy allusions very difficult to translate, but he was in fact much better at it than any other angel could claim at being. He had gotten much better at it in the past six thousand years to boot, and as such, felt he that he understood what Crowley was getting at.

"So what you're attempting to say, rather inelegantly mind you, is that you... pleasured yourself whilst under the effects of ecstasy." He cleared his throat again, rather unnecessarily. His face felt just about as red as Crowley's did and only a modest amount of this might be blamed on the alcohol. "Is that it?"

"Mmm-hmm." Crowley murmured, staring down at the ground and looking about as comfortable as an old age pensioner with sand in their pants.

"And it felt... good?"

"Always feels _good._ This felt..." Crowley near showed off every tooth in his mouth, his grin was so wide. _"Intense._ Crazy good. It just... it kind of got me to thinking what it would be like to take it when... you know..."

He did not need to awkwardly fumble towards his meaning with this one. Aziraphale knew full well to what he was referring.

"And you wanted to do this _tonight?!"_ The angel asked, thinking it was rather presumptuous of the demon to assume that the stars had aligned in such a way as to form landing strips to either side of their respective beds. If a few too many drinks was all it took to get Aziraphale to pitch his trousers, then it would very well happened long before the two-thousandth and nineteenth year of Her Lord rolled about, that was for sure!

"No, not tonight! Not... necessarily! I just had a chance to score some tonight and I thought I could keep it around. When things get to a point where we're both... comfortable. No expectation that you would take it or anything of the sort. Know how you feel about all that. Did have some thoughts as to whether it might have helped when you were having issues with your 'failsafe's', can't lie. But now that that's sorted..."

Aziraphale took a moment to drink this all in (though he hardly needed anything the more to drink, really).

He could not pretend that he did not struggle with the thought. He had come a long way as an angel (perhaps even longer as a person, one might argue) but he still had not come so far as to feel comfortable with the idea of sharing love with conflagrating factors.

The idea of being... truly intimate with the fuel what was drugs and even alcohol driving their desires forwards was to him... diminishing the authenticity of the act. It may have helped in the past, in dulling out the pain of his celestial failsafe's but even then, he hadn't wanted to use any of it as some sort of excuse. Or worse, a permissive what was quintessentially little different to a chemical starters pistol. Truest love, such as what they shared, was in no means in need of a crutch upon which to lean.

But then, this _was_ a world in which choice was very much a key player. Crowley himself had allowed for such variations to exist, simply by his having whispered into Eve's ear all those many years ago. He was simply exercising that right himself. His right, as a creature now entirely of this world, to explore those options, to taste of that which they offered. To open doors what he had never before been permitted to so much as peep beneath the bottom of.

He was not suggesting that this was something of which he needed so as to be able to partake of that intimacy with Aziraphale. But something which he might, when they were comfortable, look at experiencing. Simply another variation.

The doors of the world were far the more open to them than they had ever been. Aziraphale was still only just coming to grips with that. Too often did he still see the locks, the chains, the deadbolts what might have once kept them at arms length.

They were, he realized, restrictions which only existed within his own mind.

Crowley could see that Aziraphale's mind was ticking over and wanted, more than anything, for the conversation to be over and done with. He was long since tired of tearing things apart, only to have to sew them back together later on. Some things just had to be simpler than all that.

"Hey... look, I'm sorry. Apologize. I didn't mean anything by it. It was just... spur of the moment." He closed the last of the tiny distance between them, reaching out so as to run his hands down Aziraphale's arms. His nose grazed the angels forehead and he could smell his hair. Even amidst the lingering cling of the cigarette smoke, he still smelt good and clean. "Come on. We've been having such a good night. I don't want something stupid like this to spoil it. Hmm?"

Aziraphale made the routine mistake of glancing up and instantly relenting; for seeing Crowley's eyes peering out at him from over the lenses of his glasses. Such lovely eyes... ever the more compelling for how unashamedly they took to pining.

"It's hardly spoiled." He pressed his own hands into the demons inside elbows, squeezing softly. "You know that I worry about you. We are trying not to take as many risks and..."

"Hey, I'm a big bad demon, remember? Nothing in this little pill that's going to push me over the edge." Crowley continued peering up from under his glasses, lifting his brows in such a way so as to make his eyes look even wider and more innocent looking. "Are we... cool?"

"That's a dirty move, using your eyes on me that way." There were perhaps many an angel who might accuse Aziraphale of being a fool, but he was hardly a fool what did not take notice of what was offensively obvious.

"Sorry."

"You _know_ I can't stay annoyed with you when you give me that look." The angel smiled, moving his hands now so that they cupped to either side of Crowley's waist. He pressed in about those delectable hipbones, their bodies tilting so that they were now leaning entirely against the stairwell railing. "As you would say... we are... 'cool'."

A kiss can be considered in every way as versatile as a wink. It was far from the first that Aziraphale and Crowley had shared of course, but a kiss which spoke nonetheless of another sort of beginning.

Much as the coming of the first rain, there were storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

The merging of two disparate forces having, at long last, come together.

* * *

**~X~**


	51. Or, in which the devil drives.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the few weeks they had been 'properly' together, Aziraphale had been awakened to a world of physical pleasure he had never before been acquainted with. He enjoyed being close to Crowley; touching him, kissing him. Feeling his arms and thighs wrapped around him, the slender length of his body pliant beneath his own. The soft little murmurs, whimpers and, yes, even hisses he sometimes made when Aziraphale did something to him that he enjoyed.
> 
> He had been so very patient. Through the thousands of years they had known one another, to the past few weeks where Aziraphale's celestial failsafe's kept stomping all over any and all progress they were making with each other, Crowley had remained kind and patient and unexpectedly sweet.
> 
> He wanted more. He had been honest with Aziraphale about that from the very start of their physical relationship. He wanted to make love and he was starting to grow tired of waiting for Aziraphale to catch up to him...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS for the following chapter: Some illegal drug use (i.e taking pills). To be clear, I do not endorse nor promote the taking of mild altering substances, nor however do I condemn anyone for doing so. Everyone has a story, after all. Just want to make it clear that I do not include themes like this in The Three Stages because I think it's 'cool'. I believe it is simply a reality of human life.

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 9:15pm~** _   
_**Crowley's flat - Mayfair...** _

Meanwhile, a hop and a skip across town, a Cele-phone had been left unattended on a marble bench top. A message, currently unread, was lighting up the screen.

Sandalphon had taken the device out of his pocket a good half hour earlier, checked it and then set it down.

He would not ordinarily have done such a thing. Then again, he would not ordinarily have gone and gotten himself drunk.  
Let alone in the company of a demon.

"I once had," he said, slurring his words gratuitously. Two glasses down the demon Crowley's prize top shelf and feeling simultaneously worse about life and better about it at the same time. "A fantash-tic idea for an ocean dwelling species. Sorta like a swan, 'cept swims under the water, you know."

"Would be amazin'... swan swims underwater." Hastur said, genuinely intrigued by the notion. He wasn't quite as drunk as Sandalphon, but he was getting there.

" _Isn't it?_ Sat down one evenin'... worked out all the maths, the specifications... but you think any of the others wanted to hear about it? 'Leave that sorta stuff to the architects, Sandalphon! You're a Seraphim, Sandalphon! Go and punch something, that's all a Seraphim's good for!'" Sandalphon had taken to pacing about the living room, inhibitions diminished. Venting without apology to the demon what was currently draped upon Crowley's black leather lounge, shoes off and manky sock covered feet perched comfortably atop the armrest. "I mean, where are the employee incentives? Where is the encouragement to branch out, develop your skill sets, diversify?"

"Did ya'know," Hastur said, in that slow deliberate way very drunk people have when they are attempting to be taken seriously. "Most routine job I've _ever_ had is comin' up here to earth just to beat the shit out of Crowley? Disciplinary measures, yeah? For when he stepped outta line." He gulped down the last of his drink, filled it from the decanter he had curled up under his arm. "There was this one time, we found out he'd donated money to a children's hospital. A _hospital!"_ Hastur clearly considered this the most scandalous thing he had ever before encountered. "I mean, it was _heinous!_ And not in that bad way, heinous. Good way. Heavenly heinous! So a'course, who do they get to splinter the little runts bones into itty-bitty pieces? Me! First demon to call on when there's dirty work to be done, but soon as there's a staff meeting, no one gives a shit what old Hastur has to say!" 'Old' Hastur popped a rollie between his lips, scowling as he lit it. "Don't get me wrong, ain't no job I liked moren bustin a cap in that smug bastards crown, but just because you're good at something doesn't mean that's all there is to you."

"Try telling that to anyone in Heaven. Least you demons got your freedom to go and get creative." A lashing of common sense worked it's way through the pleasing fog of Sandalphon's human brain. "You need to smoke that outside. Makes a smell, the smoke."

"Here ya go, on again about the way I smell." Hastur grumbled, swinging himself up off the couch and staggering for the patio door. Sandalphon stared after him, confused.

"I said nothing of the sort. I said that the... inhalant thing smelt."

"You think I don't KNOW that I reek? You think I don't know?!" The demon burst out the suddenly, standing nonetheless obediently by the outside table and tapping ash into the silver tray what Crowley had set there. "Think it's... what? A coincidence _,_ do ya?"

"What are you blithering about?" Sandalphon asked, attempting to pick the decanter up from the nook of the couch into which it had nuzzled and falling face down onto the cushions instead. A very new experience this; like the strings had fallen loose.

"Shamsiel." The demon said, his voice bitter. Sandalphon managed to roll himself over on the couch like a dying walrus, staring out bleary eyed at Hastur. "My name. Back then. Shamsiel. One of the architects." He sucked in another puff from his dog end, pinched the filter tight enough to near expunge the ash from the tip. "My job to design scents. The scent of flowers, of trees, all that shit. I used to smell good too. Like fresh fruit. Baking bread. Nice stuff, ya know. Folks used to tell me all the time. 'You smell so good, Shamsiel. How do you always smell so good, Shamsiel? … Tell me what I can do so I can smell as good as you, Shamsiel."

"Please stop saying Shamsiel." Sandalphon mumbled, pouring scotch into his glass with the over attention to detail specifically relegated to the severely drunk.

"Then I get thrown down. And Michael, you know what that bastard said right before they did the big pitch?" Hastur staggered, slopping some of his own drink onto his hand in the process. "Fester in the filth of your betrayal. For eternity."

"Why _did_ you then?" Sandalphon asked, having finally managed to negotiate an unrecommended amount of scotch into his glass.

Hastur scoffed, flicking another worm of ash off in the vague direction of the table. "What choice did we have? Our work conditions were shit. All of our projects were getting canned. Wanted somethin' better." He gave a loud, barking laugh, stretching his arms out to either side of himself. "And look what it got us! A shithole, that's what it got us! Full of leakin' pipes and filth. Moanin' and groanin'. The air down there..." He stared off bitterly into the darkening of the night. Breathed out a lungful of smoke. "It's dank. Like a wet rag you pull out from behind a bath tub or somethin'. Where it's been sittin' for months."

"Sounds awful." Sandalphon observed, taking another deep drink from his glass. He could get quite good at this; he decided. The drinking thing.

"Is awful. Nothin' ta look at but walls. Grey walls. Grey, rotting, crumbling walls." Hastur stabbed out the dogend, leaving the filter in the tray. He slumped inside, bringing the smell of the cigarette with him and dropped heavily down onto the couch beside Sandalphon. "What I wouldn't give..." He said, with true, uncontested remorse. "To look outta a window... and see a rollin' hill just... rolling its way out into the horizon. Coupla sheep just... doin' their sheepy thing..."

"Eating grass?" Sandalphon offered. He was always one to jump in when someone was lacking the words.

Hastur laughed, slapping his hand to the Seraphim's thigh. "Yeah! Yeah, that's what they do, innit? Eat grass. Walk around. Eat some more grass. Make baby sheep." He drank once more from his glass, sighed deeply. "You know..." He said, turning a little so as to face Sandalphon more properly. "Maybe it's the booze talkin' but I'm thinkin'... you and me... we ain't so different."

"Except you have a bad wig." Sandalphon said and then sniggered. "And a frog on your head."

"Not on the outside! Here. On the inside." Hastur jabbed his glass against his chest, emotionally. Scotch splashed up over the lip; leaving amber droplets clinging to the front of his trench coat. "Folks don't appreciate what we have to offer. Only see what they wanna see, ya know?" He grinned, pointing a quivery finger, with its grime rimmed nail towards the seraphim's face. "But I... I see you. And one day... you're gonna make that swimmin' swan... and prove 'em all wrong!"

He swished his glass dramatically to the side, just about flinging what remained of his drink all over the wall. Sandalphon laughed and wondered just how long it had been since he and truly and earnestly laughed at anything.

"And _you,"_ He said, feeling the need to reciprocate what had been strangely kind and rather the more undemonic sentiments. "You'll put your hand up in a staff meeting and... say something that'll stop 'em dead."

"Blessed straight." The demon said, tapping the base of his glass against the seraphim's. They chuckled, taking another sip from the contents.

They looked at each other.

Five seconds later, the glasses were smashed into pieces upon the floor. And Sandalphon and Hastur were locked in a kiss what most anyone, who has ever had themselves a drunken night out, understood all too well the intentions of.

The seraphim's phone continued to glow with the message unread. A message what would remain unseen, for some time to come.

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 10:01pm~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London Soho...** _

Crowley had driven drunk. Aziraphale had let him.

He would not ordinarily have done so, but his was a mind what was hardly thinking straight that night.

They were currently parked outside of the bookshop. Crowley had somehow managed to not mount the curb and position the car in a way so as to not attract the gleeful attention of vindictive after hours parking attendants.

No small feat.

The headlights went off. The handbrake was knocked into place and the ignition switched off.

Crowley pocketed the keys. Returned both hands then to the steering wheel.

They were both nervous.

They had reason to be. They had said their goodbyes in the bar (Aziraphale spending a few extra minutes on reassuring Alice that he did not, in her own words, 'hate her' and would not 'unfriend' her on Facebook) before booking it back to the car and speeding off into the night.

They hadn't exchanged much in the way of words. Other than Crowley's, in his own mind, blatant query as to whether they ought to 'head off' after their rather heated exchange on the stairwell.

It was not the words, so much as the way they looked at each other, what spelled it out. The unspoken understanding as to where the remainder of their night might take them. The way that Aziraphale had trailed his hand about to rest tenderly against Crowley's backside. Rather than subjecting it to a passionate mauling, he had simply placed it there; applying only the slightest ounce of pressure with his fingers. All whilst looking into the demons eyes, appealing. A very tender expression, with nonetheless great and incontestable desire.

As if to say; you are mine.

As if to ask; do you want this?

Now that they were here, on the apron of those very assumptions and uncertainties, Aziraphale wondered how in fact they were to proceed. As if the nothing had changed between them, he turned, so as to say something of what he might usually say to Crowley in these situations and was instead met by a kiss.

Crowley yanked his hands off of the wheel and pressed to Aziraphale with uninhibited hunger. He cupped the palms of his hands to the rise of the angels shoulders; squeezing in want of feeling the power what resonated through them. Slid closer still so that their bodies drew flush and groaned softly for the warmth what reverberated back through him.

Aziraphale took Crowley's lovely face between his hands, cupped about the exquisite angles of his jawline and fed his tongue back into the receptive awn of the demons mouth. How he hated to admit it, but intoxication did come part and parcel with a certain piquancy. Their kiss did feel a great deal wetter than it had ever done. More unapologetically greedy; as though they were starving waifs, slucking clean the bases of their soup bowels so that not but a smear was left for the sponge cloth.

He could feel Crowley's hands sliding down to move about his chest, his waist. Touching and searching and feeling. The way in which he clutched the material of his waistcoat spoke volumes as to how much he obviously wished to rip the infernal thing to shreds and lay claim to that which it attempted to keep concealed from him.

Aziraphale sectioned his own touch along the slender lines of Crowley's back; feeling the flex of the diminutive muscle, massaging his fingers into the sway of his slender waist.

He felt a very strong urge then, to rip the base of that shirt up out of those tight little trousers and ply a path across the bare of his skin. How warm it would feel, how gratifying to be so close...

And what a relief, that there was nothing in the way of pain so as to prohibit it.

Aziraphale broke the kiss; not especially wanting to but understanding all too well that there was a far the more comfortable place in which they could continue to indulge themselves. And it was not in the front seat of what was, admittedly, a very lovely car but a car that Crowley would no doubt resent having to have dry-cleaned and aerated the following day.

"Would you... um..." Aziraphale swallowed, his mouth feeling very dry all of a sudden. He'd had a lot to drink, that was true. He knew that wasn't the half of it. "...care to come inside?" His eyes flinched shut and he stammered, afraid that he had unintentionally conveyed some hidden meaning. "The uh... the bookshop, I mean..."

"I knew what you meant, angel." Crowley passed the palm of his hand down over Aziraphale's cheek, chuckling softly. He was every bit as nervous but it comforted him to see that the angel was in the same boat. "Love to."

"Oh." Aziraphale smiled. "Good."

He cleared his throat for what must have been the thousandth time that night; attempting to gain some control over his nerves. It was no longer the failsafe's what held him at bay, but his own, very natural trepidations.

This... they had never done this before. Neither of them.

He had no idea what to expect. Let alone whether there was in fact anything to expect.

Opening the car door was the first step. It was a simple step, one he could do without even thinking about it. Aziraphale reached out, placed his hand about the steel handle as he had done the so many times before and pulled it towards him.

The door popped softly from the jam. He pushed outwards and it swung open and to the left. All of this he was very the much familiar with and it was somehow both reassuring and stabilizing. It made the next few steps easier; actually heaving his heavy, drunken body up out of the passenger seat and onto the curb.

He closed the car door with a reflexive flick of his right hand, reaching then into the pocket of his trousers for the bookshops key. Once upon a time it had been a beastly, ornate and oversized thing, what had been a terrible pain to attempt to store on his person. Though he rather the much resented the 'keeping with the times' Aziraphale was grateful he had chosen to upgrade to something considerably smaller. The weight of the key did not end up dragging his pocket and, by direct association, his pants, down towards his knees as a result.

Which wasn't to suggest that his keychain still was not a ridiculous assemble at days close. He had far too many keys to know what to do with. Most he could remember the purpose of. Some, perhaps more the reasonably the half of them, had been lost to history.

It was never usually such a chore as to identify the key what fitted the front door. He could recognize it mostly by touch alone. Then again, he was never so often in the unique position of being both unlawfully drunk and on the outside of his shop at the same time.

Aziraphale staggered up to the double doors of the bookshop, holding the fob up to the glass so that the light from inside could illuminate the keys what were fanned out in his hands much as the playing cards from earlier. His eyes were still very bleary and what might have been the once easily identifiable edges blurred into nothingness before them. Squinting did precious little besides make it more difficult to see.

"Just got to... find the right key and..." His efforts were hindered in the form of Crowley stepping up behind him and wrapping his arms tight about his midsection. He moaned softly at the placement of soft, sensual kisses to the back of his neck. "You're only making it the harder to concentrate, you know..."

"Here's hoping." Crowley sighed, his breath hot against Aziraphale's skin. "You smell so _good.._."

He smelt like cheap beer and stale cigarette smoke, Aziraphale knew. But he also knew that Crowley's sense of smell was much better than his own. He could probably still pick up the cologne he had dabbed against his pulse points earlier in the evening and this did indeed appear to be where his nose was lingering. His lips tickled as they brushed against the sensitive hair on the back of Aziraphale's neck.

It made him shiver.

" _You_ have had too much to drink."

"Or just the right amount." Crowley said, which seemed as valid a point as any. Neither of them had attempted to sober up, aware that it might well break the spell that they were under. A spell where actions took precedence over thoughts for once and a spell what had carried them this far already.

Neither angel nor demon was prepared to jump ship just yet. They would wait and see where the tides would take them.

Aziraphale finally managed, in spite of stiff competition, to locate the correct key. It took a further half minute to actually get it into the lock itself (a poor indictment for the rest of the evening, he vaguely thought) and then push the right hand door partway open. Crowley must have been leaning most of his weight on Aziraphale, because as the angel swung inwards along with the door, Crowley came along for the ride; resulting in the two of them getting comically wedged between the frame.

"Oh, you idiot!" Aziraphale snapped, attempting to pull himself in over the stoop, which only seemed to jam Crowley in harder against the seam of the door. "Let me go first!"

"Sorry. Accident. Sort of fell in over my own feet." Crowley hardly felt he could be blamed for assuming that he would be the one entering first. After all, it was very much in Aziraphale's character to invite people to enter ahead of; going so far at times to even hold the door for them, pull out their chairs or take their coats.

It was far from a usual night, however. And this was an oddity what hardly required the added effort of mulling over. Far the more important and much more needed things over which to expend energy.

Crowley managed to twist himself at such an angle so as to ease himself backwards out of the jam. Aziraphale popped from the doorway, like a cork loose from a bottle, shaking himself down and straightening his clothes.

"Well. _That_ was an exercise in ridiculousness." He observed, waiting for Crowley to stagger up into the shop so that he could close, lock the door and draw the blinds down.

He was bundled shortly thereafter into yet another passionate kiss; Crowley pulling him in so tightly against the line of his body that Aziraphale was forced onto the tips of his toes. Their arms went around one another and they were squeezing tightly; enveloped in their shared embrace. Crowley's fingers were buried in Aziraphale's hair and he was making the softest, keening murmurs at the back of his throat, which pitched the angels hunger to greater heights still. His hands clutched tighter to the demon's narrow back, twisting fistfuls of his shirt. He felt that urge to tear the material into pieces rise up in him once more like steam bursting from the spout of a boiling kettle.

He pulled himself away, easing back onto the heels of his shoes and pressing his hands against Crowley's chest. A chest what was heaving, pressing in and then easing away from his palms in time with the demons sharp, impatient breaths.

"Just... hold that thought a moment, won't you?" He smiled nervously, gesturing over his shoulder towards the back rooms. "Need to use the uh... lavatory..."

Crowley tilted his head towards the ceiling and sighed a long, tired sounding sigh. He was weary of waiting, that much was obvious but because he was fair and decent and very much in love, he was patient yet further still.

"Sure. Lavatory. Right." He waited for Aziraphale to turn around and then reached out to pinch the cheek of the angel's arse. The angel who responded in way of a simple, chiding look; a look what slipped quickly and easily into a smile before he drunkenly bumbled his way towards the door of his bedsit.

He turned on the bedside lamp, wobbling on his feet as he gazed about the room. He felt as though he was supposed to be doing... something. After all, wasn't this the most likely place that they would...? That was _assuming_ that they would...

Aziraphale turned down the coverlet of the bed, reaching over to untuck the sheets as well so as to make it easier to climb in later on. He almost fell face first onto the mattress; unprepared for just how tightly the sheets had been tucked in.

_Surely_ he hadn't gone and done that himself, had he? Seemed a bit of an overkill.

He reasoned that he had simply been distracted that morning and not perhaps the entirely focused on the task at the time. He was very strong, after all and if his mind had gotten to wandering, it would hardly have been surprising that his body applied too much effort under the guidance of autopilot.

Using the full force of his shoulders (which was considerable) Aziraphale finally managed to yank the upper most sheet and blankets free; just about sending himself hurtling backwards onto the floor in the process. He peeled them over to form a neat, triangular shaped lip just below where the pillows rested and then took up some of the throw cushions off of the bed and ferried them over to the decorative chairs what resided in the corners of the room.

He paused a moment. Something seemed... off. Though he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

He sniffed the cushions. They smelt much as they ordinarily did. He looked around the room, checking to see if anything was out of place. Nothing was, so far as he could tell.

He shook the feeling off. He was nervous and jumping at shadows; self-sabotaging, much as he always did. There was none who was worse an enemy to him than his own worrisome self.

Aziraphale set the cushions down upon the chairs, stepped into the ensuite and switched on the light.

He brushed his teeth, because it seemed the respectful thing to do and he could still taste little besides the malodorous flavour of beer and cigarettes. He might also have flossed, but thought that if he got too hard and heavy into his usual night-time routine, than Crowley was more the likely to storm the bedroom in a belligerent stupor and what a turnabout for the evening that would be.

Aziraphale rinsed, spit and applied some more anti-perspirant. He spent a while then, staring at himself in the mirror; straightening his attire, levelling out his bow-tie and brushing his fingers back through his hair. His eyes, he thought, looked almost haunted.

He pressed both hands down to either side of the sink, rested his weight into them and took a few slow, calming breaths.

Was this actually happening? Were they actually about to go ahead and make... love?

Aziraphale had felt very much at peace with the idea at the bar and ever the more certain of his convictions during the drive to the bookshop. Now that he was here and staring down the metaphorically loaded barrel, his nerves were starting to take over.

There was so much at stake, after all. It was far from a simple thing; though he imagined most humans would tend to disagree.

They had been friends a very long time. They had loved one another nearly as long and had experienced and cherished that love _inabsentia_ of the seemingly mortal requisites of physical consummation.

Neither of them had done anything like this before. Whilst Crowley was well acquainted with self-pleasure and bringing himself to orgasm, Aziraphale had never experienced anything the remotely resembling it. The only time in which he touched himself was to use the bathroom or to clean as required. And if, during the course of said cleaning he had experienced any inappropriately resultant pleasure, he would hastily cease whatever actions he was in the midst of and wait until the excitement had worn off. That or run the shower cold.

Oh, he'd certainly been tempted in his time. He had a healthy relationship with pleasure. They were like old friends who remained in touch despite the passing of so many years and the changing of circumstances. And from what Aziraphale had been told, by Crowley and in conjunction with the many books he had read, orgasm was a pleasure what was without corporeal equal.

And yet he had never gone there. Had never _seen_ the point in an angel going and getting acquainted with the world of sex. Not to mention it seemed a sort of sad thing; sitting alone in a bookshop playing with himself, when he could be eating another scone or something the less embarrassing.

Even when he had fallen in love with Crowley, he hadn't spent much time imagining the two of them one day coming together in a torrid tangle of conjugal bliss. He hadn't even supposed that the two of them would ever kiss; not until Crowley himself had taken these questions well and truly off of the table.

In the few weeks they had been 'properly' together, Aziraphale had been awakened to a world of physical pleasure he had never before been acquainted with. He enjoyed being close to Crowley; touching him, kissing him. Feeling his arms and thighs wrapped around him, the slender length of his body pliant beneath his own. The soft little murmurs, whimpers and, yes, even hisses he sometimes made when Aziraphale did something to him that he enjoyed.

He had been _so_ very patient. Through the thousands of years they had known one another, to the past few weeks where Aziraphale's celestial failsafe's kept stomping all over any and all progress they were making with each other, Crowley had remained kind and patient and unexpectedly sweet.

He wanted more. He had been honest with Aziraphale about that from the very start of their physical relationship. He wanted to make love and he was starting to grow tired of waiting for Aziraphale to catch up to him.

The angels fingers tightened to either side of the sink as he heard music being played on the gramophone from back inside of the store. _Andante Festivo_ by Jean Sibelius. Crowley always seemed to lean in favour of classical music what paid particular homage to the string orchestra. Aziraphale supposed he enjoyed the more sombre and almost maudlin tones that the instruments were capable of producing. Ironic, given his modern day preference for slow rock.

Aziraphale did actually need to use the toilet and so he took a break from his somewhat muzzled freak out to urinate. The strains of the music rose and fell from the adjacent room. He wondered what other mischief a drunken, amorous Crowley might have been getting up to in his absence. For some reason, the image of a feather boa drifted into Aziraphale's mind and he snorted to himself; imagining Crowley waiting, splayed un-seductively across the settee with the boa wrapped about himself, glasses hanging crooked, slurring his words and probably dribbling wine everywhere.

More the likely, he would probably have gone and passed out by the time Aziraphale emerged. Then, the angels only requirements would be to offside an almost genuinely heartfelt 'oh well' and carry the snoring demon to bed and tuck him in.

Aziraphale finished urinating, shook himself off and flushed the toilet. He washed his hands, poured himself a glass of water. Its' contents trembled as he raised the glass to his lips and took a few deep gulps; trying to get rid of the horrible dry feeling in his mouth.

Why was he so nervous about all this?

This was Crowley, after all. This was the person he loved more than anything in the world. Who loved him (in conjunction with his Bentley, one would argue) more than anything else. Being intimate with the person you loved ought not to be such a potentially terrifying prospect.

Aziraphale set the glass down and once more unnecessarily brushed his hands over the front of his vest. His fingers stumbled across something which pushed out the front left hand pocket. He reached inside and pulled out the little bag containing the two ecstasy tablets he had forgotten to hand back to Crowley earlier.

_I ought to just flush the horrid things,_ Aziraphale thought, eyeing off the drain in the sink. He opened up the seal of the bag to go ahead and do just that but hesitated.

Crowley's words from earlier were passing through his mind like a train in a dense fog. The lights from which could provide some means of working out just what might have been going on, whilst leaving the edges still indiscernibly vague.

The tablets had made him feel confident, relaxed and happy, he had so much as said. Had eased off the edge of his anxiety and made it far the easier to keep on with the keeping on.

Had intensified the already potent sensations of physical pleasure, such that they were overwhelming. _Insane,_ was the word he had used. Something unexplainable, beyond reach of plausibility, of rationality.

If it had been any other night, Aziraphale would not so much have considered such a thing. If his celestial failsafe's had still been locked and loaded, he might very well have been rendered _incapable_ of doing such a thing.

But this was not any other night. Aziraphale's failsafe's were gone. And he was an angel what was very tired with battling his sensibilities every two seconds of every day. How nice it would be, simply to _feel._ To not have to worry or second-guess every little decision or fret over the potentially disastrous outcomes.

Giving himself no time so as to think about it, Aziraphale shook one of the two little tablets into his hand, pitched it straight between his teeth and chased it down quickly with a gulp of water from his glass. He then stared at himself in the mirror, wide eyed and astonished by what he had done.

The point however, was that it _was_ done. Oh sure, he could use a little magic and simply miracle the drug out of his system but that would have been a cowardly thing to do. He needed to have _some_ strength of conviction. That was what the world was about, after all. Making choices and then rolling with the consequences.

Aziraphale drained the last of his water, wondering how long it would take for the tablet to start working its own brand of magic. He sealed the tiny bag and placed it back inside of his vest pocket, pausing once more to stare at himself in the mirror. He didn't look any different. Nor did his eyes; the pupils of which he heard were supposed to dilate.

But then he recalled; back in the sixties, when Crowley had been doing research into illicit substances, that it had taken over a half hour for the effects of the ecstasy to have started presenting themselves. So it seemed very unlikely that Aziraphale was going to go and start feeling properly relaxed any time soon but at least, it was a start.

He decided he had wasted enough time loitering in the bathroom and after one last soothing breath, switched the lights off and drifted back out through the bedroom and into the shop proper.

At first, he couldn't see where Crowley had gotten to. The interior of the store had, in his absence, been filled with hundreds of detached pages; what were drifting unencumbered through the air and floating up so high as the second floor.

Aziraphale felt a surge of panic, thinking that the demon had found the perfect means of taking revenge for the angel having dithered so long in the bathroom. But then one of the pages drifted on past and he recognized a photograph of the overwater bungalows in Bora Bora. It seemed that Crowley had stumbled across the holiday brochures Aziraphale had picked up from the travel agency earlier in the week and was perusing them with his usual degree of flair and flourish.

"Glass of wine on the table for you, angel." Aziraphale heard from above. He glanced towards the ceiling and found Crowley crouched sideways on the 'W' of the compass point what had, many years prior, been painted onto the sides of the second floor. He had shed his glasses at long last and was staring intently at a page clutched in in the fingers of his right hand, whilst sipping from a glass of wine in the left. He did in fact look a great deal more comfortable and relaxed than Aziraphale currently did and if the angel was prone to cursing, he might very well have cursed the demon for making it look so easy.

"Oh. Yes. Thank you." Aziraphale picked up the glass of red wine from study table and sipped from it. He was so drunk, he actually could not pick what type of wine that it was, which was a rare thing where he was concerned.

He wondered whether it was a stupid idea so as to mix alcohol with the tablet he had just taken but reasoned that there was already quite enough alcohol in his body to make this a moot point anyway. Besides, he gathered it was the sort of thing humans did all the time and he was a great deal more sturdy than they were.

"I see you found the brochures that I picked up." He said, sitting down in his chair and tilting his head back so as to keep an eye on what Crowley was doing.

"Lot of places in the world, isn't there?" The demon remarked cheerfully, flicking the page he was currently looking at away and then pushing off from the wall. He drifted across, as though he were an astronaut in zero gravity and plucked another page out of the air. "You ever been to Dubrovnik?"

"No, but from what I can see it looks very beautiful. Historic town."

"Think they filmed some of Game of Thrones there..."

"Yet another dreadful show you supposed I would like." Aziraphale said, with a wrinkle of his nose. "Despite all evidence to the contrary."

Crowley flipped himself upside down, grinning as he drifted away towards the far end of the room with his legs in the position of the Hanged Man of the Tarot cards. "Thought you might relate to the theme of forbidden love." He said as he bounced off of the second floor railing and starting idly drifting back like a wayward helium balloon.

"Not _incestuous_ forbidden love."

"Such judgment." Crowley swung himself upright, held the page up to just offside of his lips and sent it billowing across the room with a light puff of air. "Aren't we all, every one of us, the children of the one creator? As such, is not all love, by default, incestuous?"

Aziraphale wasn't listening. Something had clicked in his brain with the intent of a shotgun cartridge being loaded into its chamber. Several somethings, all at once, in fact. Pieces falling together, quite uninhibited and so startling that it was enough to shock him senseless.

It was the breath... The way that Crowley had pursed his lips and sent air outwards so as to direct the piece of paper away from him.

He had done the very same thing when vanishing blue paint from Aziraphale's coat the previous year.

But this was not the _first_ time Aziraphale had seen this, he now realized. He had seen it once before. Thousands of years before. Long before there had been an earth upon which either of them might set foot.

He had seen it in the vast, marble laminated hall what comprised the work space of the architects.

A cherubim had been floating there once, upside down, gazing at a tiny planet pinched between two fingers. He had exhumed air out from between his pursed lips and from that breath, a beautiful incandescent ring of glittering dust had formed about the circumference of the planet like a halo.

The pieces continued to fall. One after another to the point that hot flushes started to race through Aziraphale's body. It was all at long last starting to make sense. He could see the picture coming together in his mind.

_"I was always elected tenor whenever we had to sing the hymns in Heaven."_

Only cherubim's were capable of singing in tenor. So it was only natural that they be elected to sing those parts.

_"I remember Cupid. He did like to hug way too much. Sometimes more than hug."_

Cupid was one of the five first tier cherubim's. He would have been familiar with every subset of his race and, as cherubim, would have loved them far the greater than any of the other angels.

_\- the enormous green of the eyes-_

Cherubim's had been designed in such a way as to be more physical appealing. They possessed softer traits, what were intentionally applied so as to make them look more vulnerable. Large, brilliantly coloured eyes were a biological facet what they were most renowned for.

_\- the feeling of love-_

They were angels what were imbued with a much greater capacity to love than any of God's creatures. They were replete with it and as such considered to be far the more sensitive, far the more naïve and trusting and ever the more at risk for how intensely vulnerable their unrepentant love rendered them.

It seemed more the likely that not even damnation could have burned this astounding degree of love away. Not entirely. And whatever remained could very well have risen from those ashes, like a green sprig what might then grow to form the trunk of a mighty tree.

_"Please. Please, help me. I only asked questions. I didn't even fight in this stupid war, I had no idea things would turn out like this. Please, I beg you... I'm afraid!"_

The damnation. The ring of fire. The sulphur.

_"I didn't really fall. I just... sauntered vaguely downwards."_

The large green eyes. Shining with tears on the verge of being cast down.

_"Why?!"_

_"I didn't do anything wrong!"_

_"You're damning us! Cowards! The lot of you!"_

The _same_ cherubim.

"Oh my God..." Aziraphale murmured, not even stopping to think that this was an appeal he had been avoiding making for quite some time now.

"Hey, it was just a joke. ...sort of." Crowley stopped turning his itinerant circles on the ceiling. Watched as Aziraphale rose zombie-like from his seat and crossed so as to stand almost directly beneath him. His expression looked as though it were only being menially held together by the barest of threads.

"It's nothing really." He said meaningfully. "Just a silly galaxy."

He watched now as Crowley's face froze, those enormous eyes widening further still and his lips contrastingly press the tighter together. As though he were on the verge of tears and wanted to hold them at bay for as long as he could.

Aziraphale scratched the contours of his memory once more. There had been a name ascribed to the workspace... he remembered having looked at it before drifting up to observe the cherubim's admirable efforts. In all the heartbreak what had followed, there had been no time what might have been considered suited for introductions.

But he remembered. He remembered because of what the name itself meant. It was a word what, in the Heavenly language of their time roughly translated to 'pleasant sound' and was more the often used in reference to sounds and songs that were considered in fact to be _very_ the much pleasant.

_"Umabel."_ Aziraphale said and the devastated look what stole across Crowley's face said all at once that he had hit the nail square on the head.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I promise my dears *claps hands together* the best is yet to come ;)


	52. (NSFW) Or, in which display tables are not made of very stern stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Ma chere, my lovelies! It is with deepest pride, and greatest pleasure, that I welcome you here tonight. And now I invite you to relax, let me pull up a chair, as Madammortis proudly presents: 
> 
> Your smut :)
> 
> Warnings for this and the following chapter (in case I had not made it obvious): Explicit sex scenes. Tie your napkin round your neck, cherie's ;) Or, if smut is not your thing... you... may want to fold your napkin and retire to the drawing room for at least a... few more updates!

**~X~**

* * *

"You were the cherubim Umabel. Angel of physics and astrology." Aziraphale laughed softly to himself, seeing the pieces fall completely into alignment at long last. "Of course. What a fool I am..."

"How did you figure it out?" Crowley asked, floating slowly back down towards the floor. He did not look at all pleased by Aziraphale's efforts, though the angel had expected nothing less.

"The way you were moving just now. The look on your face. Flicking the pages about. I remember the face. I remember the beauty of the constellations, the nebula... your pride..." Aziraphale's own soft face wrenched painfully at the memory. At his own part in the entire tasteless and sordid affair. "Your... terrible disappointment..."

Crowley smiled bitterly as his feet found the floor. "Rather the more than disappointment, angel." He said. For what else might you call the casual destruction of seven hundred years worth of work? Seeing something into which you had poured so much love and energy snapped out of being with as much effort as one might take to swat an ant what was taking a stroll across their desk?

It had been over seven thousand years now, but he doubted the sting of that one would ever depart from his eternal spirit. It was a wound what had long since been salved with the bitter edge of vinegar.

"We took so much from you, didn't we?"

"Hundreds of years worth of work." Crowley shrugged, kicked the tip of his boot against a buckle in the rug. "Know it wasn't purpose. On purpose. You know..."

"And it was you. ... _You_ were the cherubim." Aziraphale's breath caught. His body quaked. Eyes what were already foggy with drink fractured further still. Crowley's figure shuddered, blurred and disappeared behind a wall of tears. "The one that I..."

"The one you let slip between your fingers." The demon what had once been known as Umabel spoke so simply of the fact. As though it were not the very thing what Aziraphale knew would forever haunt him; in a way what not even Heaven's contempt could ever compare.

"One of God's truest creations of love..." His eyes widened, allowing for those tears to break free of the grip what held them. They coursed down across the drink pinkened arches of his cheeks; for the most part unacknowledged by Aziraphale himself. "Of course... it makes perfect sense... because of course a cherubim amongst all who had fallen would retain those true vestiges of love! You were angels what were replete with love!"

"Hey, hey now. Hey." The blurry image what was Crowley appeared to be raising its hand. Bringing a halt to words what he clearly had taken exception to. "Whatever love I have is my own. Okay? Ain't no hang on's from days past. Ain't no... vestiges, whatever it is you called it. All this is _me."_ A finger turned and tapped firmly against a wall what might have been a chest. Aziraphale wasn't certain. "Not _Umabel,_ not that... that other name what Satan gave me. All just Crowley. All mine."

"But the fact that you are _capable_ of it-" Aziraphale protested and was cut from the course as assiduously as the Reaper's scythe might cleave through the life coil of whatever mortal was fated to cross his path.

"Is that fact that you are capable of loving a demon a Heavenly bestowal, Aziraphale? Because you, as an angel, have no choice but to love everything?" Crowley was genuinely curious. Quite as curious of the answer, as he was at the same time deeply afraid of it. "Or is it a love of your very own making? A love what exists separately to that which you _must_ feel?"

"It's not a demon that I love, Crowley." The angel sought for the handkerchief what without fail always dwelt in the confines of one of his many pockets. Was astonished to find that on this, of all nights, he had been remiss with it. He was forced instead to use the sides of his hands with which to clear his eyes. "What I love is you. You just happen to be a demon. I suppose that I would love you if you were a mollusc or some such thing."

Crowley huffed, as amused as he was in fact, deeply touched. "A mollusc... That _would_ be strange. But then again... you are strange, so... hardly at all surprising, really." He peered the more closely at Aziraphale, his brows creasing in ways what were evident of his confusion. "Why are you crying?"

The angel wondered how such a thing was not at all obvious. Especially to someone who was usually so attuned to even the most infinitesimal of nuances. "Because I failed you, my dear. Through my cowardice, my own lack of conviction, my... misguided beliefs. I... I let go of your hand." He looked to Crowley's hand as he said this and sobbed for seeing so clearly the desperately reaching fingers of the poor cherubim who had pleaded with him. Who had reached out to someone who had been such an unworthy recipient of that hope. "... I... condemned the person who I love the most! I saw to it that you suffered indescribable torment, because I lacked the courage to protect you!"

"And it was the _best_ thing that ever happened to me, angel." Crowley crossed what meagre space was left between them; tears forming a lustrous enamel upon the surface of his own eyes. "If I had never fallen, if I had never gone along with all those old boys back in the day and asked all the wrong questions, then I'd probably still be propped up pretty and stupid in Heaven, whilst you were tooling around down here with some other lucky demon."

He shrugged, tilting his head back to try and keep those tears from leaching out at the corners. There were too many tears these days. But it was Aziraphale's what made it all the worse. Seeing someone like him cry, someone who was so strong, who could weather the most awful and heartbreaking of circumstances was every much as disabling as having a hammer taken to your toes.

"Not a big believer in fate, me, but... this..." Crowley slipped his hands over Aziraphale's cheeks, feeling the tears pool into the lifelines of his palms as he did. "It was meant to be. And I am so... thankful that you let go of my hand that day. Because it brought us together. It let me know you in a way I would never have been able to if I hadn't taken that plunge into darkness. It let me become Crowley. You let me become the person that you fell in love with." He took up Aziraphale's hand, brought it to his face and lent his kisses to the palm, to the fingers what had made him. "I can never repay you for that..."

Aziraphale yanked his hand away, horrified by Crowley's words.

"I did nothing deserving of praise. I was a coward." He coursed his fingers back through his hair, registered the feeling what was his heart pounding the harder and the faster in his chest. Was it the drug? Was it the everything? "You did not deserve what happened to you! Yes, I love you entirely for who you are now and I can't imagine ever knowing you in any other incarnation but... the pain you must have suffered..."

"It wasss worth it." Crowley hissed.

"You can't possibly thank me for something like this! It was... despicable! I had no idea how well things would turn out! I failed you."

"I forgive you."

Silence dropped between them like an anvil. Aziraphale knew that Crowley was parroting back the words that he himself had offered the demon the previous year. The demon who believed that he was never in a position to be forgiven; not by God, not by anyone. A transgression what Aziraphale understood now to have been far the less of an offense than any that he himself had in fact committed during his thousands of years on earth.

Umabel had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Umabel had been wounded by what they, Heaven's military had done to him and had drifted away from the path of light.

Umabel had asked too many questions.

Aziraphale had, in contrast, given away a Holy relic of Heaven and then lied directly to God about what had happened to it. He had lived a frivolous mortal existence; snapping miracles into being where desired as a simple matter of his having wanted something. He had executed diabolical miracles on the behalf of Hell simply because it lessened his workload and freed up a weekend here and there for him to go and indulge an antipasto plate at whatever new eatery might have opened its doors.

The weight of his sins was so much the heavier than that of which Crowley had ultimately been condemned for.

And it was a sickening thought. An unfair thought. How Crowley must have resented him all these years for it.

That look upon the wall of the Garden of Eden all those years ago. That was not a look of admiration, of amusement.

But a look of _astonishment._

_'How are you able to get away with that, when I am what I am for want of saying the wrong things?'_

None of it balanced out. It was an injustice what had tipped the scales in Aziraphale's favour all these years. It was skewed and it was heartless and it was in no way deserving of the mercy what was Crowley's forgiveness.

"I don't deserve it." Aziraphale said and knew he had never been more the certain of anything in his entire life.

"Too bad. You have it. My love, my gratitude, my forgiveness... every last inch of me, you have." The serpent, stubborn as it had ever been, smiled as he turned on his heel, holding his wine glass not towards Heaven, but to the future. He stepped in amongst the swirling, dancing pages of that which the earth offered on a plate. "And for that matter, _look_ at what we have; the two of us! Heaven and Hell may have tossed us to the collective shit heap but we got this whole big beautiful orb at our fingertipsss! That's a Heaven of a consolation prize! We can go anywhere! Do anything! The world is our freakin' oyster, Aziraphale!"

He raised his glass and drank deeply, perhaps a little too enthusiastically one might say. A few crimson drops broke free of the borders of the glass and split from the corner of his lips, down towards his chin. He dashed it away with the side of his hand and laughed at himself, offering a then merry whoop as he spun in a circle, sending the pages to whipping wildly about him. Here then, was Crowley, ever the more chaotic, uninhibited and carefree than Umabel could ever have hoped to have been.

A thing what might have been broken, had risen what was far the greater than the sum of all its shattered parts.

"That's right." Aziraphale whispered, seeing all those pieces what had fallen together in his mind, drift easily apart once more. How much more the sense it made, how _clearer_ the path forwards, when the walls were torn away. "... We can do anything. ... We can... even..."

He looked at Crowley. Crowley, who had never looked more the happy, more the contended.

He had red wine stains between his teeth.

He looked dreadful.

He looked beautiful.

Aziraphale set his glass down hard upon the nearest surface; whatever that was. Glossy pages slipped around and then out from his path as he crossed to where Crowley continued to stumble and slurp languidly from his wine.

He looked ever the more astonished by the moment as Aziraphale captured him by the front of his shirt, pushing him back so that his heels partway dragged the Persian rug along for the ride. The demon found himself shoved up hard against the bookshelf nearest him, tomes jostled violently from where they had not been so carefully stacked, such that some were rousted free and rained down on either side of his startled features. One particularly heavy volume bounced off of his shoulder but it was a tiny thing, what he paid little the mind.

Aziraphale's hands were cupped hard to either side of his face. He was kissing him and the kiss was hard and hungry and uncompromising. Crowley could feel himself wilting beneath the force of it, like a flower what had been denied its photosynthesis privileges too long. His legs had turned to spaghetti and he was trying to figure out just what to do with his one free hand, when Aziraphale pulled away with a draw on his bottom lip what seemed to be connected to a livewire what ran directly down to Crowley's groin.

The angel stared into his eyes from that tiny, irreverent distance between them. Watching and waiting to see just how the demon was going to react; little though he honestly cared for the seeking of approval in that very moment.

The pages all stalled in their cursory orbit, hovered a moment and then suddenly dropped, landing hard upon the floor as though they were in fact as heavy as river rocks. There they remained, for the magic what had sustained their trajectory was at the whim of a creature what was ever the more purposefully distracted than he could ever remember being.

"If you're, um..." Crowley swallowed in one of those terrible, teenage romance movie ways what always seems far too audible to be authentic. He could feel his pulse points throbbing, particularly those about each of his ears and fancied that this was a sign that his human bodies blood flow was working itself into a traffic jam in its efforts to relocate south. "I-If you're going to go there... Aziraphale... don't go backing out at the lassst minute. Getting a bit tired with getting my hopesss up."

He was hissing a lot more, he knew. He always did when he was nervous. Bit of a diabolical speech impediment, that one.

"No backing out. No... nothing, just..." Aziraphale leaned closer, brushing his lips over Crowley's. Cupping them slightly and breathing the heat of his desires into the demons waiting mouth. "I need you, my darling. Oh, I want you _so_ much..."

He reached then into his vest pocket, far the wholesomely invested with the flow of which he was currently riding and retrieved the small bag. He held it up to where Crowley could see it.

"Here." He offered and the demon frowned, focusing what were very much the already unfocused eyes upon the contents of the bag.

"Where's the uh... the other tablet?"

"I took it." Crowley glanced back at him in pure shock. "Are you angry?"

Crowley shook his head. "No. Not angry. Surprised. Not angry." One of his angular brows arched delicately. "Can I ask... why?"

"What you were saying before... My darling, we've spent so very long dancing to the beat of Heaven and Hell's drums. Everything I did what I thought was right and what do I have to show for it?" He lent his lips to the curve of Crowley's ear, lowering his voice. It was not intended as a charade, or an insincere enticement but was every bit as honest as Aziraphale was so often at a fault for being. "I'm tired of holding back. I'm tired of feeling Heaven's fingernails still hooking into my soul at every turn. To the devil with it all. To God with it all. I know what I want." He stroked the column of the demons winsome throat, pressed the lines of their bodies the harder together, so that Crowley was all too expressly aware of the authenticity of the angels words. "I want _you._ I've wanted you for so very long."

Crowley wasn't at all sure what had gotten into Aziraphale that night. With the exception of the tablet, yes, but something much greater had to have been at play for him to have made that very out of character decision to partake of the drug in the first place.

He had been so insistent on the particulars pertaining to their coming together that first time. Had stressed the categorical importance of their both being clear of mind and clean of body at the moment of their joining. So as to be wholly present for an act what was incomparably intimate and loving and metamorphic.

What had shifted in Aziraphale's mind so as to prompt him to cast aside these otherwise staunchly observed ideals and submit wholesomely instead to his more baser and lascivious of instincts? It had to have been a great deal more than his simply being liberated from the barbarous bonds of the celestial firewall.

Crowley had known Aziraphale a long time, and he had never known him, not in all their six thousand years, to ever just throw caution to the wall.

He was structured, and ordered and painfully tentative. He took a lot of talking around to things and even then Crowley would be required to re-seduce him every time they broached the subject of the Arrangement. It was a permanent fixture of the angels personality, a routine construct and something of which the demon could never at all imagine being easily subverted or rerouted.

It was food for thought. But Crowley was also very much drunk and very much taken by surprise and much more the hungry for something what food was simply unable to nourish.

He took the plastic bag out of Aziraphale's hand and managed to work the seam apart; which was rather the more admirable, given just how much his hands were trembling. He jiggled the remaining tablet out into his palm, slapped it against his lips and projected the pill deep into the rear of his mouth. His teeth made short work of it; grinding the pellet into a mushy paste that his tongue worked first across the plains of his gums before then swallowing back. He wanted no more time wasted in getting the full and breathtaking effects that it offered.

"Then take me." He leaned closer with a hiss. "I'm yoursss..."

A part of him suspected that Aziraphale would find reason, as he so often did, to back off. Instead, the angel continued to surprise him; taking the wine glass out from between Crowley's surprisingly taught fingers and pitching it off somewhere into the greater beyond. It smashed, likely making a terrible, potentially expensive mess but Aziraphale did not so much as flinch in response.

His pulled Crowley into the crushing passion of his embrace, their lips joining the once graciously more; tongues slipping and sliding without any semblance of composure or symmetry. Aziraphale's palms slithered purposefully down, the both of them cupping about the firm globes of Crowley's delectable arse and squeezing. He used the tight grip so as to tug the demon savagely away from the brace of the bookshelf, whipping the demon about as though he were made of nothing the more objectionable than cardboard.

Aziraphale was steering Crowley in some vague direction what apparently made sense in the angels inebriated mind. They were stumbling, because of course they were very drunk and very distracted and such combinations are of course not without their otherwise intended but ever the more ostensible side effects.

Crowley had been attempting to somehow guide their clumsy transition as best he could by reaching out with whatever hand was free to touch to familiar shelves, tables and the like. He had forgotten about one particular display, set near direct centre of the awning what opened up towards the second floor. He backed into it and might have been able to right himself, if Aziraphale had not been bearing down on him with the ardent determination of an amorous tidal wave.

The tiny table, with its ever more tiny legs, presented little challenge against their combined weight and it toppled over like a wind scorched sapling; sending tomes and angel and demon alike sprawling across the floor. Crowley's tailbone struck the wooden boards hard enough to send pain ricocheting down through his hips and into each of his legs. It might not have been as severe if Aziraphale had not contributed to it by landing almost directly on top of him but alcohol was, as it had always been, a particularly useful numbing agent.

"Fu- shit! Sorry..." He groaned, suspecting that the shock of seeing all his precious books cascading across the hardwood like water loosed from dam, was enough to snap Aziraphale out of whatever hedonistic trance he had entered into.

Contrary to everything that was however thought to be known about the angelic bibliophile, Aziraphale did not seem to give so much as a hootenanny as to what had just occurred. His attentions were, for the once, entirely and subjectivly, focused on Crowley.

"It's fine..." He murmured, his lips lending themselves to the gap in the demons shirt. He staggered lascivious kisses up along the distended vein lines of Crowley's slender neck, his chin and most everywhere upon his face that he could lay claim to.

Crowley snatched a hold of his lips once more; a kiss what lingered, what felt so intensely anchored with passion that he knew full well there was to be no backing out of things now. He could feel the livewires of his brain spring to life, the effects of the ecstasy working their way the faster through him for having rubbed the mulch against his gums earlier. He squirmed beneath Aziraphale's weight, tremulous and anxious with desire.

"Why don't we just... slow down long enough to get ourselves to the bedroom in one piece, eh?" He suggested, giving a somewhat timid and nervous sounding chuckle. A chuckle what ascended swiftly into a startled squeak as Aziraphale swung onto his knees and reached, unashamedly, for the front of Crowley's pants.

"No." The angel said firmly, taking a hold of the designer belt and slipping the leather free from the clasp. He unhooked the steel tooth from where it had been pinned in place and jerked the straps apart. "Here."

Crowley blinked. He wasn't at all sure he had heard right. _"Here?"_

Aziraphale responded by yanking firmly upwards on the hem of Crowley's trousers, providing just enough give so as to pop the button free. He worked the zipper down in one fluid motion and then peeled the demons pants down just low enough so as to expose the bones of his hips.

The bones what lent themselves to that ever so succulent sway of the demons' hips.

Aziraphale thirst for them; had spent so many the idle moments wondering how it might feel to not only look upon this part of Crowley's body but to touch and taste and sup of it. He wasn't sure as to why, but those sharp edges he found extraordinarily erotic and he felt his mouth flood with saliva; much as he did when his dessert was on route to the table, following a particularly scrumptious two course meal.

Desire swiftly conquered the remaining vestiges of Aziraphale's inhibitions and with a soft, plaintive moan of resolve, the angel set his lips to each of those libidinous peaks, kissed and then rubbed the arch with his thumbs. He took Crowley's waist between his hands, holding him steady as he slipped his tongue lavishly over the bone on the right; grazed his teeth across the skin what was pulled tautly across it like saran wrap. There was no pain this time, only the absolute and exquisite pleasure of taking that which he had wanted for so insufferably long.

"Now." He hissed, trailing his lips and his tongue from one side of Crowley's abdomen to the other. Though it was not the first time it had happened, he was very much aware of the throbbing ache between his legs; the stiffening of his sex organ. This _was_ the first time, however, he was very much in the mind as to how he might deal with it, which did not, for once, include the dousing of it with cold water.

He wanted it buried; every single, aching inch of it, deep inside of Crowley's exquisitely lovely body.

The demon, caught betwixt that ever so unique an experience of being both incredibly turned on and equally flummoxed, gaped at his surroundings like a suffocating fish.

"In a... pile of all your books? Your rare books?" He felt the need to elucidate. Some of the books had fallen in such a way so that they were standing up upon their very much brittle pages. He was reclining on some of them and they were not particularly comfortable; being of the hardcover variety. Mind you, Aziraphale was providing many a way in which to be distracted from such menial discomforts but if things went and got... messy...

Aziraphale seemed to have not taken in a word of what Crowley had said. He removed his hands from about the demons hips, staring down at him with lust-darkened eyes as he took each half of Crowley's shirt and ripped it open, without so much as a 'how do you do'. The shirt, what Crowley had only just purchased that very day, offered the sort of menial resistance what made the demon seriously suspect it had not been at all worth the money he had spent on it. The buttons catapulted off, skittering across the floor in a sound what was reminiscent of the scuttling feet of a tiny mouse searching for food crumbs. There had been a slight ripping sound, as threads were torn through and the seams under Crowley's arms even stretched and popped from just how furiously Aziraphale had yanked the halves apart.

Because the day had been a warm one, Crowley had not been wearing a singlet beneath the shirt. The length of his slender chest, heaving dramatically from the rapacious exertions what were being envisaged upon him, was lain bare. His skin shimmered with a slight sheen of sweat, small droplets of which poised suspended on the luscious indentures of Crowley's waist; as though having been halted in their downward trajectory by Aziraphale's dogged attentions.

"Now." The angel repeated, his tone leaving nothing in the way of room for an argument. Crowley, wide eyed and for once not having any idea as to what to say, nodded.

"Yeah, okay. Here. ... now."

He allowed for himself to be pushed back into the impromptu bed of assorted volumes; moaning softly as Aziraphale placed his hands, once more, to each side of his waist. He lowered his lips to worship the band of flesh below the demon's navel, pressing a kiss against the trail of hair what served as a guide to more the exciting matters further south. Aziraphale murmured fervently, the same sort of sound he might have made in the tasting of something delicious, fanning his fingers up over the bare skin of Crowley's belly and chest; his movements guided by the slippery film of perspiration what bedewed the demons pliant and readily eager flesh.

Crowley sighed deeply, tilting his head back as the warm pressure of the solicitous touch coursed its path over his chest; the palm grazing against one of his nipples. It sent a sharp, rush of pleasure right down the length of his body, pinching tightly into his groin and he gasped, trying to push upwards with his hips but unable to shift them from between the tight grip the angel retained to each side.

Crowley caught the back of Aziraphale's hand beneath his own, holding it in place and then guiding his fingers in circles over his nipple. It had never felt anything like this when he had played with them himself; the sensations were nowhere near as intense. He was squirming beneath the sumptuous touch of the angels' fingertips, breath heavy and legs curling up off of the floor so as to pin his knees about Aziraphale's stalwart body.

The angel who, after lending yet another kiss to the centre of Crowley's heaving chest, trailed his lips over to where the demon had effectively commandeered his hand and easily twisted his fingers free. He cupped his palm to the rise of Crowley's ribcage, traced his thumb across the bones as though they were the fulsome strings of a mandolin, before then placing his lips, devoutly, around the eagerly waiting bud.

Crowley's back arched off of the floor and he gripped the sides of Aziraphale's vest between his fists, crying out for the feeling of the angel's mouth closing in about him so perfectly. He tugged with his lips, massaging the nipple tenderly in this fashion before lapping at it with the very tip of his surprisingly dexterous tongue.

"Do you like this?" He softly queried, staring up into the demons enchanting eyes. The demon who nodded back at him, with a still present vestige of shyness what Aziraphale found both charming and intensely desirable. "So do I." The angel confessed, guiding his mouth across so as to pay tribute to the bud what had so far been left unnourished. "You taste of such sweet things, my dear heart."

Crowley felt, once more, the touch of the angels' supple lips. He felt Aziraphale's tongue slide against him and he cried out, pitching his head back and bouncing his skull off of a waiting leather cover as a result. He thrust upwards with his hips, desperate to alleviate some of the aching pressure in his groin and and was thusly rewarded with the feeling of Aziraphale's cock rubbing exquisitely against his own. He thrust again and the angel now met him in kind, their hips grinding together in a corporeal dance much similar to that of which they had shared the mere hours earlier on top the settee.

Aziraphale eased up, finding Crowley's lips with his own and feeling those soft, tender columns part in anticipation of his tongue. They took deeply of one another's kiss, the demon reaching down now and digging his fingers hard into Aziraphale's buttocks. It was much wider than his own arse, Crowley thought, pressing in with his palms, murmuring soft, pleasurable susurrations into the heat of Aziraphale's mouth. But the feel of it was good. Soft and yet somehow strangely comforting. Another further indicator of the angel's physicality; his presence, his capacity for strength, for resilience and power.

 _lt feels so good,_ the demon thought, parting his lips so as to invite the angels tongue back over into the waiting shelter of his mouth. _Every blessed bit of it._

He could still hardly believe that it was happening. Even with the angels ample weight pressing him down into the floor, the feel of their eager sexes rubbing together and the hard corner of some book or another poking into his spine, Crowley felt still an overwhelming urge to reel off and pinch himself.

It had taken so very long to have arrived at this point. They had travelled a winding road together what had been paved with far the too many unnecessary of words. Soldering strips wrought from tears and mortar what was composed of consummate, yet still fulsomely felt instances of intense heartbreak.

Aziraphale wrenched Crowley up, away from the floor, and, ever the more importantly, out from under the bathetic weight of his thoughts. With the hand that wasn't currently supporting his shoulders, he peeled the halves of the now somewhat tattered shirt away and proceeded to yank what little remained of it, down the demons arms.

Crowley assisted as best he could, near about disassembling his watch in his bid to remove it, so that it would in no way inhibit the path of his sleeves. He managed to get it loose just in time and proceeded to then fling the one of a kind, designer accruement across the room with all the verve of a chemically endorsed Olympic discus champion. What did it matter to him as to whether the glass smashed or the finite, gossamer internals were to be obliterated by a merciless head-on collision with the impervious edge of a bookshelf? All it would take was a snap of the fingers to put that to rights and he had rather the more important things on which to currently focus.

The path of the demons arms now mercifully clear, Aziraphale encountered little in the means of resistance and was able to slide the remnants of the shirt free. He tugged the base out from under the reticent grip of Crowley's pants, casting the sundered material indiscriminately aside before cupping his hands up snuggly beneath the demons jaw.

He bore him back down against the floor, lips apprehended in yet another luscious, possessive kiss. A kiss what then proceeded to works its path over the decadent avenues of the demons jawline, the tanned steppes of his cheeks and the shapely curve of his chin. Aziraphale navigated his lips around, so as to touch to the marking of the snake on Crowley's left cheekbone, taking the cursed symbol into the custody of his kiss before dropping his mouth so that it rested flush to the pulse point in the demons neck.

Much as he had done in the tasting of the apple all those many years ago, Aziraphale bit deeply of the proferred flesh; repaying the demon in kind for the mark he had left upon his own neck earlier that day. Crowley gasped, his toes flexing tightly in the grip of his boots and his back arching at the sting of the angels perfectly white, unexpectedly sharp teeth.

What a sublime thing, the pain. How it both hurt and excited in the one congruent act. The heat of the angel's mouth, the wetness of his tongue... That he had bitten hard enough to draw blood and that his tongue was now passing over that scant tear in the demons flesh, as though it were the sweetest of nectars what sprang from the well of his body.

 _I watched you bite that apple,_ Crowley thought, twining his fingers deep into the locks of Aziraphale's hair and using the grip so as to push the angel's mouth the harder against him. _And saw the worth of the world enter between your lips._

_Seeing you submit, was exquisite._

_There are no words what give justice to the_ feeling _of it._

"I don't know _what_ has gotten into you tonight..." He panted, pressing his mouth to the side of Aziraphale's face and sliding his tongue up so as to bring the lobe of his ear between his front teeth. He nipped it, licked and then sucked; utilizing all those little skills what he might usually employ in the act of tying a knot in a cherry stem. "But I hope it's got legs..."

As Aziraphale's lips applied themselves to the desirable slopes of Crowley's collarbone, the demon eased his trembling hands between their chests and picked apart the knot of the angels bowtie. It took a few attempts, for his fingers were a little numb and he was _more_ than a little drunk, but he did at last succeed in yanking the horrid thing out from beneath the collar of Aziraphale's shirt and tossed it off to the side with his left hand.

One by infuriating one, he popped free the curmudgeonous buttons what held the angels waistcoat shut and yanked the halves apart so as to gain access then to the shirt that it sheltered, much the way in which a mandarin peel protects the wedges of fruit what dwell within. You can imagine by this stage, that the descent into each of the layers of Aziraphale's clothing was wearing quite as thin on Crowley's temper as it had surely been on Dante's when he had embarked on that well meaning little jaunt into the multi-level parking garage that was the Inferno.

Patience was a virtue of whom Crowley had no intention of parlaying that evening and so, instead of meandering his idle way down the line of Aziraphale's shirt, he located instead what spaces existed between the buttons, worked his fingers into them and then tugged as hard as he was able.

He was not as strong as Aziraphale but passion, it would seem, is a persuasive enabler. Threads ripped free with minimal protest, buttons ricocheted off into the unseeing abyss. Even that eternally stalwart chap what hunkered up high and mighty on the angels collarbone, glaring with shiny, unflinching resolve from beneath the customary shelter of the since jettisoned bow tie was no match for a randy demon and was quickly, and punitively, felled.

One might have supposed Aziraphale to have been mortified by the desecration of his clothing. And, if it had in fact been his waistcoat what had been rent apart at the seams, he may very well have been. This was something of which he had kept in near pristine condition (if not for some natural abrading what was to be expected in the passing of the years) since the 1800's and to see it so thoughtlessly ravaged was very much in line with Crowley sauntering out one morning and seeing some wayward youth with a predilection for chroming, dragging a key along the front door of his Bentley.

But the shirts were a dime a dozen. And, if Aziraphale was being honest with himself, he had rather _enjoyed_ the feeling of Crowley yanking it apart quite as voraciously as he had. Quite as much as he was now enjoying the touch of the demons hands as they reached on in between the halves of the shirt and hungrily partook of the body what dwelt beneath.

Whatever the weather, Aziraphale had always been one to dress in layers and so it was unsurprising that he still wore a singlet underneath his shirt. A singlet what was tucked in, nonetheless.

Crowley did not however let this deter him in any way; caressing his palms greedily over the paunch of Aziraphale's soft, round belly. He was somewhat familiar with the feel of it, because he had spent many a night with his arm curled about the expanse of the angel's stomach; sometimes with his face resting against the slope of it, when Aziraphale was perched up in bed reading a book and Crowley was otherwise attempting to nod off to sleep.

He had never touched it quite like this. It was so different to his own body; which he himself believed to be thin and hard and sharp in all the wrong places. His stomach, what was flat and firm, what possessed nothing in the way of comfort and warmth, could not begin to compare to the tenderness what comprised every lovely curve of Aziraphale's safe and dependable form.

He couldn't begin to understand what Aziraphale might possibly derive from him, in turn. It must have felt like embracing a bundle of cold sticks, what had roughly been compiled into a vaguely man shaped effigy with a smart mouth and somewhat the smarter clothing. A demonic scarecrow doffed in rust coloured locks and snakeskin boots.

Crowley wanted very much to bury his face into the cosy rolls of Aziraphale's belly; to rip the singlet up out from the front of his pants and press his lips and cheeks in against the velvety hills of flesh. But there were other things what he was just as eager to get his hands on.

The broad expanse of the angels chest, for one. Back in the days of the garden, Aziraphale had been in possession of pectoral muscles so finely hewn, you might have slapped an iron bar across his chest (if such a thing had been invented at that time and you were under the impression that Aziraphale was in fact deserving of such treatment) and bent the thing in two. There had been a lot of time passed since the days of Eden however and what had once been a body what many of the architects had underhandedly referred to, back in the day as 'Eight-Pack Aziraphale', was now very much drifting in the tow of the earths gravitational field; aided and abetted by the subsequent shelving of more meals then there were Lee's in a Chinese phone book.

Pectorals that were once as hard as granite slabs were now far the softer and heavier mounds and Crowley found he did not mind the feel of them in the very least. Much like the angels stomach, they were reassuringly supple and much like his chest, had a comforting breadth to them. It belied his acquiescent strength; an ever present physical reminder that in spite of the easy life he now led, Aziraphale was still a creature what was and always would be, strong.

Crowley reached up, broaching the curves of the angel's broad shoulders and then down further so as to wend his fingers through the spattering of course hair what protruded over the scoop of Aziraphale's singlet. He took the material between his fist, using it so as to yank the angel back down towards him; taking his lips in a kiss what was all too quickly brought to a close by the angel pulling sharply away.

Crowley might have felt himself disappointed, but then it was hard to be disappointed at the feeling of both legs being swiftly elevated off of the floor and brought to rest against Aziraphale's left shoulder. He kept his lust filled eyes firmly pinned to Crowley's, as though he wanted to make absolutely certain the demon was watching every little thing that he did.

His dogged hands tugged off each of the expensive, Italian shoes and pitched them into the same unknown in which the wine glass and the watch currently dwelt. Having dispensed with these lesser obstacles, the angel reached down so as to take custody of the sides of Crowley's pants. He worked his fingers in, feeding them underneath the band of the boxer shorts, as well. Intending to be shot of both, in the one fell strike.

"Lift your hips." He ordered breathlessly, lending an encouraging slap to the curve of Crowley's tight little arse. An invitation the demon could hardly resist and he obediently bucked his hips up off of the floor, balancing his weight on his shoulders. Aziraphale gave the trousers a hard, punitive tug, applying so much force in the venture that Crowley found himself jerked roughly along the floor; an act he found intensely exciting.

Aziraphale slipped his hands around to the sway of Crowley's back, yanking at the hem of his pants so that he could drag them over the pert curve of the demons' buttocks. They were of course, very tight trousers and it took quite a bit of negotiating, but a determined, horny angel is by far a force with which to be reckoned and he eventually had his way; managing to wriggle and work the obstinate leather down as far as Crowley's thighs. Once there, he took a hold of the base of each leg and pulled, bit by bit so as to free them entirely. One sock came along for the ride, whilst the other chose to remain behind, barely clinging on to half of the demon's lithe, dangling foot.

Aziraphale balled up the trousers and underthing's with a lack of attention to creases what might have, in more sober a setting, flabberghasted him, and tossed both articles of clothing over his shoulder. He reached then, for the silver tie still obdurately looped about Crowley's neck; the one he appeared to wear purely for some oblique aesthetic value and eased it up over the demon's ruffled head, dropping it to the floor beside them.

The demon lay before him, naked to the exception of one very lonely sock, both legs resting compliantly against Aziraphale's left shoulder. His face was very red, his arms splayed above his head, long fingers curled in slightly towards his palms. He panted softly, biting then at the corner of his lip as he stared up into the angel's appreciative eyes with palpable anticipation.

He looked positively mouth-watering.

Aziraphale had never seen Crowley so exposed before. The once, perhaps, a week or so earlier, when they had been bathing together at the demons flat in Mayfair but then he had only viewed the demon from behind. This was another matter entirely.

He was long and lean and very slender. He did not possess much in the way of muscle but his was a body what was in no way diminished for want of it. He had a dark spattering of body hair upon his chest and dotted across his stomach and legs. He was in full male form and as such, had an erection; which sat eager and at attention along the line of his flat stomach.

Aziraphale spent rather the long while staring at it. He'd seen such things before, of course. It was hardly possible to have weathered away the better part of six thousand years without stumbling across a happy male sex organ at some juncture or another. But this had very much only been in the context of his witnessing it at a distance, rather than being in direct... affiliation to it.

He could never have imagined looking at an erect penis and thinking there was something the lovely to be taken from it. But gazing at Crowley such as he was in that very moment; laying there before him, so utterly exposed and vulnerable, so trusting... the angel could not deny the deep well of adoration and arousal what now took to bloom inside of him.

The slender pinch of that waist, the jutting of those perfect hip bones, those long, lithesome legs...

"Look at you..." He sighed, running his hands along the plains of Crowley's pliant thighs, down underneath so as to cup the bare cheek of the demons arse. He squeezed firmly, pressing his thumb hard into the pert muscle, feeling his desire intensify ever the more by the moment. "You're so beautiful."

He lowered Crowley's legs, bending each of them gently as he did so he could press kisses against the rise of each knee. Crowley reached out with trembling hands, sliding them across the ridges of Aziraphale's knuckles. His back arched, quite of its own accord and he moaned decorously at the worshipful touch of the angels lips. Finding their mark against those very places where the demon had so long dreamed of feeling them.

Aziraphale slowly parted Crowley's legs to either side of him, kissing now the erroneous peaks of his ankle bones before lowering the palms of his hands and pressing them to the underside of the demons pale thighs.

Crowley could feel himself going very red and he mumbled apprehensively as Aziraphale eased his legs higher. He received a soft, gentle shushing as a reply to his anxieties; the angel apparently having little interest in assuaging his insecurities at that moment. It did seem a somehow very meaningful exchange, for two beings who were infamous for never being able to shut the hell up, to require now only the most minimal of softly woven utterances in which to transmute their intentions.

Aziraphale tutted to himself; having caught sight of the thick, purple bruise what bled outwards from Crowley's perineum onto the right cheek of his bottom. He had felt it himself, when inhabiting the demons body earlier and had half a mind to go ahead and heal it the first moment he had, but time had simply gotten away from them.

"Why you never just asked me to heal this for you..." He murmured, tracing his finger lightly across the surface of the bruise. Crowley squeaked and flinched, apparently not being prepared for the touch at all. "My dear, this is not going to go at all well if you do not try and relax."

"I-I know." Crowley said, swallowing heavily as he watched the back of Aziraphale's head move down to rest between his thighs. He pressed his lips together tightly, squirming at the feeling of the angels mouth brushing against the bruise, cupping the skin in an ever so tender kiss. The warm tingling sensation what he associated with the healing spell washed through his lower extremities and he moaned softly at the subtle vibration it caused.

He felt a little embarrassed, because Aziraphale was now getting a very good look at him from an angle that the demon had never even seen himself. He did in fact feel very relieved that he had gone to the effort of waxing those few days earlier, in spite of the fact that it had left him bruised, tender and vaguely traumatized. The idea of Aziraphale seeing him untamed and untrimmed would have only made him more the self-conscious than he already was.

For his part, the angel however did not appear the least opposed to the view he was receiving. He seemed, in fact, to be studying every inch of Crowley's undercarriage with an expression what would not have seemed out of place if he had been applied to the painting of a landscape. One of which he assessed as being of incomparable beauty.

His brain may very well have been little more in that moment than a cosmic soup of chemical intoxication and repressed hormones, but Aziraphale found himself pausing that while longer, awash with intense feelings of love. For someone like Crowley, who placed inordinate emphasis on protecting himself, who effaced a near perpetual countenance of being collected and unshakeable, to place himself in this vulnerable position, to in fact offer himself, made Aziraphale feel extraordinarily privileged.

How beautiful he looked. Every inch of him.

Aziraphale found his eyes being drawn towards the place in which they were soon to be joined. That delicate pink pucker, what would likely have never been seen by another living soul, was evidence of the great trust Crowley placed in Aziraphale; in allowing him to gaze upon it in the first place.

And how very sweet it was. Every bit as sweet as the skin what shrouded the exquisite bones of his hips.

Perhaps every bit as sweet as his lips...

* * *

**~X~**


	53. (NSFW) Or, in which the locks fall away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: As with the previous chapter; NSFW warnings apply. Even more explicitly than the earlier chapter! You have been advised!

**~X~**

* * *

Crowley gasped sharply at the glancing touch of Aziraphale's mouth, astonished that he would think to do such a thing. Would he not think it... unclean? Vulgar, even?

"Aziraphale, what are you-" Crowley's menial protests splintered off into a long, deep moan as he felt the glide of the angels tongue against him. _Why was he...?_ How _was he..._ "Hey... you... you don't wanna... come on... you don't wanna do... that..."

"Hush, darling. It's simply another part of you." Aziraphale soothed, passing his fingertips across the curve of Crowley's inside thigh before slipping his tongue up over the sensitive pucker once more. Crowley felt as though his toes might strain for how hard he was pinching them. "A very sweet part, at that."

"Aziraphale..." Crowley's chin dropped down almost as low as his chest, eyes bulging as he felt the tip of the angels tongue now penetrate him. "Oh... fuck _..."_ He groaned, twisting his hand up into his hair, back arching so that it near formed a dramatic upside down U above the floor. He writhed as Aziraphale's tongue teased and pleasured him; poking in and out of the vestal aperture, giving short, sharp flickering jabs that made him feel as though the top of his head was about to fly off. "Fuck, that feels good. _.."_

Aziraphale tittered softly to himself, ghosting the tips of his fingers up along the equally tender skin of Crowley's luscious inside thighs. The demon wondered if this entire area was composed explicitly of nerve endings, because he could not keep from twitching and squirming at the soft, gliding touch. He gripped handfuls of what he dearly hoped were pamphlet pages off of the floor and scrunched them tightly between his fingers. He felt as though he might come apart at any moment and wondered just how much of this was down to the salaciousness of the act and how much of it was in fact, the portent effects of the Ecstasy.

He hadn't long in which to dwell on it. Aziraphale's hands had roamed across so as to cup to the underside of his knees and he was bringing them up now to rest on each of his shoulders. Without uttering a word, he raised his head, placing kisses to the sensitive plains of Crowley's inside thighs before, without a seconds consideration, applying his lips and tongue to the underside of the demons cock.

Crowley had not been expecting this. He wasn't at all sure what he had been expecting when Aziraphale had foisted his legs up onto his shoulders, but he certainly hadn't been expecting that the angel planned to go down on him. He thought this might have been something he would work his way up to in a couple of decades or so. And then, only so as to trot it out on special occasions; such as Christmas or Tchaikovsky's birthday. Or when Crowley begged long and hard enough and guilted him into it. What he supposed to have been the usual arrangement between long term couples.

The first touch of the angels mouth against him was so extraordinary that Crowley near about cracked his head open on the floor. He gasped wordlessly at the ceiling, his throat closing together to form a long tremulous moan as he reached a hand up to bury once again in the messy flock his own hair, feeling the then indescribable sensation of Aziraphale taking the entire length of his sex into his mouth and sucking on it.

 _Certainly puts the old left hand to shame,_ he thought, eyes bugging so wide in their sockets it was a wonder they did not pop free and roll away across the floor. The feeling was vaguely similar to that of masturbating in the shower; when his palm had been entirely wet and slippery with the water. But that, he was quickly realizing, was a very much poor mans equivalent of the sublime pleasure he was currently experiencing.

He could feel Aziraphale's tongue flexing and moving against the underside of his sex, curling up about the sheathe with every hard suck the angel made. Crowley lifted his head, finding himself deeply enthralled by the view what awaited him. Those delicate lips - lips what could so easily drive him mad by want of kisses alone - formed a tight ring about the base of his cock; sliding up and then down to devour the eager length in the cavern of that warm, grasping and sweetly wet mouth.

How Aziraphale was not given over to gagging Crowley did not know, because he could feel the port of the angels throat yielding to him and yet he maintained that same mesmeric rhythm as though he was in fact intimately acquainted with the act. He was softly murmuring his perceived contentment, the vibrations of which sent a tingling through the sensitive skin of Crowley's shaft and drove him to moaning once more.

The demon was of the absolute and uncontested opinion that he had never felt anything so good in his entire life. He was fighting the overwhelming urge to thrust up deeper into the angel's heavenly mouth, knowing that this would be far the too much too soon. The feeling of that mouth, the tongue swirling about him... he squirmed at the mercy of it, like a fish whats' mouth was skewered on a hook, digging his heels into Aziraphale's upper back as some means of battening himself down into reality, pushing back against the heightening waves of pleasure what threatened to tip him over the edge at any given moment.

He didn't want to come yet. Not yet. There was still too much left to be savoured.

"Oh... f-fuck, that feels _so_ good..." He reached one hand down, almost hesitantly, to bury in Aziraphale's hair. He did not apply pressure, not wanting the angel to think he was forcing his mouth down further but instead tangled his fingers in the snowy locks. An expression of love for what the angel was doing for him. "H-how do you even know how to... do any of this...?"

"You ought to try picking up a book on occasion." Aziraphale said, his voice muffled from about Crowley's sex. His eyes locked with the demons and the very much dilated pupils seemed to twinkle with uncharacteristically mischievous energy. "You'd be amazed at what you can learn."

Crowley chuckled nervously. "Never... thought I'd be glad you're sssuch a... ah! ... A... b-bibliophile." He stuttered, tilting his head back so that it rested once more on the cover of the book what had become his subsidiary pillow. He thought it a wise thing to do, for if he spent any the more time watching Aziraphale suckle on him, he knew he wasn't going to last much longer. It was easily the sexiest, most erotic thing he had ever seen in his entire six thousand years. Watching the angel eating chocolate larva cake had nothing on seeing his own sex being hungrily engulfed between Aziraphale's candied lips; seeing it licked and savoured and enjoyed as though it were the very finest of meals. Given that it came with the added bonus of Crowley getting to feel every painfully sweet and perfect sensation, it was no surprise that it came out on top.

He did wonder as to whether it was going to make dinner dates dull by comparison.

Crowley's thoughts were stringently obliterated as he felt one of Aziraphale's hands move from where it had been cupped about his thigh and slide purposefully underneath the cheeks of his arse. He brushed his middle finger up through the cleft, the ever so slightest graze at first, as though to test the waters and then pressed in further so that his fingertip glanced over the demon's virgin aperture.

Crowley felt a rush of alarm go through him, worried that Aziraphale was simply going to go right on ahead and ram his finger in without any proper preparation. The more the likely result being that Crowley would be launching himself, butt naked out through the window; much to the collective shock of the citizens of London Soho.

"Wait... wait let me just..." He was quietly relieved that he need not go into any further detail than this. Aziraphale kept his finger where it was, but ceased his gentle ministrations. He continued drawing on the demon with his mouth, which honestly made it a little difficult for Crowley to concentrate on what he needed to do but it was hardly a thing you had cause of place to bitch about.

The demon raised his fluttering fingers to just offside of his hip and he managed somehow to snap them. He used magic to ensure both that he was clean and also to lubricate the inner channels in preparation for Aziraphale. Sure, he might have foisted himself up and gone about the place looking for a suitable water based lubricant, but he highly doubted that this was something Aziraphale was likely to have on stock. He probably had something he used to clean his book keeping utensils, but the demon suspected that it was not the sort of thing what was safe to use internally. Probably sting like a bastard, to boot.

Besides, he didn't want to drag himself up off of the floor and risk breaking the spell. They had a good thing going right then and there. If a little magic needed to be wasted on making certain that their first time was going to be clean and enjoyable, then so be it.

Crowley reached down, gesturing urgently.

"G-give me your hand..."

Aziraphale, without giving pause in what he was doing, slipped his hand out from beneath Crowley's body and raised it to where the demon could take hold of it. Crowley swiftly brought it up to his mouth, sliding the index and middle digit between his lips. He licked between each one, kissed and sucked; coating them with as much saliva as possible. Thinking all the while that in a few short moments, those firm, strong fingers were about to occupy yet another channel of his body.

It was a thought what overwhelmed him with desire, none of which was in any means eased by Aziraphale's dedicated attentions with his mouth.

Satisfied that he had done the best job that he could, Crowley raised his hips slowly, just enough so as to slide Aziraphale's hand back underneath his bottom. He took a deep breath, trying to relax his muscles, in spite of the fact that his anxiety often led him to naturally puckering up.

"Okay... n-now."

Aziraphale's index finger brushed over the tight little hole, tracing it at first, so as to spread some of the lubrication about. Having done so, he wasted no time then with easing the digit through the snug ring of flesh; all the way down to the second knuckle.

Crowley gave the sort of loud moan he would have ordinarily felt very embarrassed about. It sounded much too like what those people on the late night television shows would have done. He hadn't meant to make quite so much noise but the feeling of being penetrated this first time was absolutely astonishing to him.

He had never done it to himself. Not when he had been existing as a male, that is. It was the sort of thing with which he could never have imagined drawing much satisfaction from; not when he could simply bring himself to orgasm by stroking his dick a certain number of times in a certain number of ways. He hadn't felt the overarching need to include his bottom in the proceedings and rather suspected it didn't have much to bring to the party, anyway.

When he and Aziraphale had first started getting physical, Crowley had of course quickly arrived at the understanding that the dynamics of two men making love required that one of the two men pony up their backside at some point. It seemed obvious, given the energy of their exchanges thus far, that this was more the likely to have been Crowley. Which was an arrangement he had felt comfortable with, at a distance, but he would have been lying if he'd said he hadn't nursed some natural trepidations over it.

Would it hurt, for example? Would it feel odd? What if he wasn't clean and it got messy and unhygienic and Aziraphale had a germophobic meltdown and ceased proceedings so as to urgently Purell everything within a ten mile radius?

Given his natural anxieties, you might have thought Crowley would have invested some time in practicing for the upcoming event and it was true that he had taken to touching himself the once or twice back there. But he had quickly come to the conclusion that he wanted Aziraphale to be the first and only one to penetrate his body and did not wish to dim any of the newness of it.

Fortunately, he was quickly discovering that the feeling was, in fact, a very good one. It helped that he was well lubricated and he groaned softly at the sensation of Aziraphale's finger passing back and forth through the sensitive ring muscle, brushing against a sweet little place inside of him which made sparks burst against the outer edges of his brain. The sensation was deeply satisfying, but somewhat odd; to feel that particular movement in a place where he had never before felt such a thing.

It was not at all long before Aziraphale inserted his middle finger, branching it apart from the first so as to stretch Crowley out. This felt even better than the single digit had done and Crowley moaned unashamedly, tilting his head back and squeezing both hands into Aziraphale's hair.

Murmuring soft entreaties, the angel tenderly teased the sweltering passage of Crowley's body; a delicate initiate to the inimitable act of love what was to follow. Crowley could feel the bend in each of the angel's fingers as they rotated in and out of him; the knuckles rubbing against the sensitive walls of his inner channels. He was suddenly very grateful for the fact that Aziraphale was such a frequent purveyor of the manicurist, because getting scratched up there would have been a far from pleasant ordeal and the angel was moving his fingers rather quickly and indiscriminately now. Twisting them about as he inserted them, as though driving a corkscrew into the waiting cork of a bottle. He was getting a little rough in his passion and there were a few moments, where he plunged in particularly hard, that Crowley felt a sharp ache claim siege to his lower body.

Stranger still, was that the demon found himself rather enjoying the pain. It was extraordinarily intense and the fact that Aziraphale seemed so remorselessly intent on plundering him, was utterly exhilarating. Every whimper what Crowley made only seemed to pitch the angels fever to greater heights still and he curled his fingers about so as to now rub the tips firmly against the flexing walls. Every stroke what brought them into contact with the bundle of nerves deep inside sent Crowley to writhing with ecstasy.

It was a succulent taste of things to come and the demon quickly found himself reduced to a state he might ordinarily be loathe to have others bear witness. His handsome features set in a grimace of pure sexual rapture, pleading moans and helpless sobs loosed from between his lips without construct, back arching, hips bucking, purring shamelessly for want of the angels laboriously massaging fingers. He vaguely wondered as to whether his heels were leaving bruises to each side of Aziraphale's spine, for he was driving them in with about the same equivalent force of a political retraction.

That feeling of being stretched and repeatedly penetrated, along with the hot, wet grip about his cock was pushing Crowley quickly to the edge; an edge he was ever the more surprised he had not gone hurtling off of already. He pressed his lips together so tightly it was a wonder he did not sprain them, as waves of pleasure contracted and built up, one upon the blessed other. He knew that when the edges started to blur together that he was getting very close to coming and this was not at all something he wished to do whilst Aziraphale's mouth was on him. He murmured urgently, wrapping some white curls about his fingers and giving them a tug in an attempt to elicit the angels attention.

Aziraphale however, seemed to have a sense that the demon was fast approaching the point of orgasm and he slipped his mouth off of his now glistening sex and pushed himself up between Crowley's legs, capturing his gasping mouth in another opulent kiss. His fingers continued their now leisurely movements inside of him; each flexing out and then coming back together like a pair of child friendly scissors, making good and certain that Crowley would be thoroughly prepared for him.

With the hand what was now free, Aziraphale reached down so as to impatiently wrench apart the button of his trousers. He worked loose the zipper, which was difficult, as he was right handed and attempting to do all of this with his left and reached inside so as to liberate the prodigious length of his erection from his underwear.

"Your hand." He ordered, his voice heavy and tremulous with desire. Crowley dutifully dropped one of his hands from out of the angels tangled nest of hair and passed it over into the waiting grip of Aziraphale's palm. Aziraphale guided it swiftly down to the gap of his pants and Crowley took a hold of him without hesitation.

He felt a momentary flush of anxiety at his first touch of the angel's sex. He had known that Aziraphale was considerably well endowed (more the likely an accidental expenditure on his part) and had quietly nursed the hope that he was, as the work girls might have said, a 'shower' rather than a 'grower'. Aziraphale already had more than enough to 'show' and Crowley felt that if he were to get even further engorged, that it was only going to be all the more difficult so as to accommodate comfortably inside of his own body.

He was bigger than Crowley might have otherwise preferred; enough to make him feel a little wary about what was to come. Why popular society insisted with ascribing such importance to the prolific endowment of the male sex organ, the demon could not pretend to understand. True, it would have been preferable to know that they were _there_ when you got well and down into the nitty gritty of it. But not being divided up the middle with the biological equivalent of a bowling pin was also a worthwhile selling point.

Crowley glanced his hand along the length of Aziraphale's cock. It was very hard and very thick and much, much larger than two fingers, no matter how chubby said fingers were.

It did of course change nothing so far as Crowley's desire to make love to Aziraphale went. It made him feel a little anxious, yes, but all that meant was that they would simply need to be considerate and gentle going in.

Crowley started stroking the length of the angel's sex, though he didn't get very far along with it before Aziraphale just about buckled in half.

"Oh..." He gasped, his mouth falling open and his fingers now resting inert inside of Crowley's body. He was given over to trembling and was using his free hand now to pinion his weight against the floor; keeping himself from collapsing entirely. "Oh... good Lord... _"_

"Don't thank _Her."_ Crowley grumbled, somewhat testily. "I'm the one doing all the work."

"I'm... I'm sorry, I..." Aziraphale gasped again as Crowley continued his slow, languid, yet ostensibly firm movements. "Force of... habit..."

It occurred then to Crowley that Aziraphale had never experienced anything like this before. He professed to never having even given himself pleasure and so this touch, Crowley's touch, was the first of its kind. Little wonder that the angel was just about breaking apart at the seams.

Crowley felt both touched and grateful for this honour granted him; being the first to bestow this every intimate of acts upon the person that he loved. He, of course, had never done this to anyone beside himself, but he knew what worked well for him in the past and so attempted to replicate it in kind.

He used his thumb to brush up underneath the swollen, leaking head, the head what was circumcised for some reason (he had been meaning to ask Aziraphale about that at some point, but had never known quite how to bring it up). He moved however slowly and carefully, not wanting to push the angel; what was a novitiate in the realms of sexual proficiency, over the threshold too soon.

He watched the angel's face intently; taking his own pleasure in that look of delirious ecstasy suspended above him. The fingers had since returned to moving inside of him, though the effort was a considerably distracted one. It still felt entirely wonderful and when Crowley got to thinking that it was in fact Aziraphale's fingers what were penetrating his body, the excitement sent jolts of rapture down into his loins.

Lurid, unabashed images coursed through Crowley's mind; Aziraphale taking him by the legs, rasping with desire as he plunged the entire length of his prodigious cock between the demon's waiting thighs, taking deep of the virginal cleft in way of hard, punitory thrusts that sent the demon to thrashing and moaning. To calling out the angel's blessed name in concerto with Aziraphale's own euphoric cries of passion; begging for the sweet release of the pleasure what was building up excruciatingly inside of him.

Crowley didn't want to wait any longer. He couldn't. He'd waited long enough as was.

He eased up, taking a nip of Aziraphale's succulent lower lip before then sliding his tongue along the column of it. His back was slick with sweat and it peeled away from the covers of the books beneath him like a cheap decal on a car windshield. They were probably ruined, the books, and neither Crowley nor Aziraphale gave a blessing or a damn.

"I want you inssside of me, Aziraphale..." The serpent whispered, pushing their lips together and slipping his tongue over into the angels mouth; a blatantly carnal demonstration of the act he wanted the angel to perform.

Aziraphale, panting softly, eased back so that he could look into Crowley's eyes. Those beautiful, limpid eyes what were so deeply laden with lust, yet ever so sweetly earnest and wanting.

He slid his fingers free and took a hold of Crowley's exquisite legs, lifting them so that the demons thighs were now pressed in tight against his own belly. Crowley released his grip on Aziraphale, though not without first using magic so as to slather the considerable length of his erection with lube. He was not leaving anything to chance and he knew that without keeping everything slippery, there was more the likely to be some pain.

Aziraphale perched back upon his knees and reached down, using his thumb and fingers to gently flex apart the tight ring of Crowley's arse. After a few moments, he took to frowning and he lent his hand sharply to the demons left buttock.

"For someone's sake, please relax!"

"I _am_ relaxed!" Crowley insisted, who looked about as relaxed as a cocaine trafficker going through customs with eight balloons loaded with produce shoved into every available orifice and a sniffer dogs nose lodged into his genitals.

"I can feel you flexing against me. If you don't relax, it's going to hurt." Aziraphale rotated his hand about so that his palm faced towards the ceiling. He inserted his index finger once more into Crowley's vestal aperture and started to move it slowly in and out, smiling as he saw the demons eyes flutter shut and his hips roll reflexively upwards. "How does that feel?"

"Amazing..." Crowley murmured, clenching his fists once more about the crumpled pages to either side of his lazily bucking hips. He groaned as the second finger was lovingly inserted and started to move in tandem with the first. He could feel himself starting to relax; a natural side effect of his taking pleasure in the opulent sensations. He stretched along the floor, arching his back, bringing his arms up above his head and moaning. "Oh... feels _so_ good..."

"That's it... you're doing so well, darling." The fingers slipped slowly in and out of the tight little pucker. Aziraphale found himself watching, somewhat the morbidly intrigued by the sight. The way in which his fingers pushed in, delved out of being; how Crowley would whimper so beautifully when another digit was added. He had started pushing down with his hips, hungrily meeting the thrust of the angels probing fingers. The corners of his lips were curved upwards to form a smile of pure, unadulterated pleasure; stripped entirely of self-consciousness and decorum.

 _He loves it,_ Aziraphale thought, pinning his pinkie finger down with his thumb and chancing the insertion of a third finger now. Crowley arched, sighing deeply, his fingernails digging into the floor above his head. Blistering scratch marks were carved deep into the wood, each one glowing brightest, infernal orange before fading into the black of deepest ash. _Look at how he writhes and gasps and squirms. How he pushes back against me..._

_His sensuous, wanton moans..._

Aziraphale swapped hands, easing each finger in now one at a time, taking a good feel of the warm channel of Crowley's body. The body of which was now very slick and shiny with sweat; what was coiling about on its bed of books and loose pages like the snake he had once been. The sight of it made Aziraphale's sex leak and twitch and he lowered the hand what was free to temporarily stroke and soothe it. Aziraphale could have simply sat and watched this decadent display for hours; so utterly succulent he found the sight of Crowley moaning and twisting, his body opening up so compliantly about the invading fingers.

But Aziraphale wanted to do a lot more than just watch. Desire was rising up urgently inside of him, requiring satiation. His groin ached in painfully sweet anticipation; wanting nothing more than to wrap the demons legs around his body and bury himself deep up inside of that warm, sweltering passage.

Aziraphale pulled down a little more magic through his fingers, further lubricating the channels of Crowley's body and then carefully slipped the glistening digits free.

Crowley opened his eyes, watching as Aziraphale's hand fell and took a firm hold of his erection. He guided the head down, pressing it against the tight ring muscle and proceeded then to stroke the tip up, down and around, as though attempting to find a way inside. Crowley tried to relax all the muscles in his lower body.

The lubrication eased the transition and he eventually felt himself open up to accommodate the swollen tip of the angel's leaking cock. He bit his lip, anxious and waiting for Aziraphale to continue. To ease himself slowly and tenderly inside the uncharted aperture, giving the demon plenty of time in which to accustom himself to the brand new experience of their being joined this very first time.

This was not what Aziraphale did.

For Aziraphale was a creature very much undone by the virgin throes of pleasure and the feeling of being buried even an inch deep in Crowley's resplendent body was enough to drive him over the edge. He wanted to plunge himself deep; feel those hot, hugging channels encapsulate him on all sides, hear the demon cry out for being filled so completely.

Aziraphale took his hands from the back of Crowley's knees, clasped them about the globes of his sumptuous little bottom and yanked him down hard.

Crowley's body parted readily around him, devouring the entire length of the angel's cock with about as much relish as Aziraphale's mouth had done the demons sweet sex. He cried out, unprepared for the richness of the sensation.

The hot, slippery channels pressed about him in the sweetest of embraces and he was forced to release his grip on the demons arse so as to slam both hands hard against the floor. He thought he might collapse, for the feel of it was unlike anything he had ever before known and a stray thought wended its way up through the intoxicating clouds of pleasure; that he had been a fool for denying himself of it for so very long.

Crowley, as you can imagine, had not at all been expecting Aziraphale to thrust himself in quite as quickly as this. He yelped loudly and shuddered, all of his muscles clamping down as he felt that long, thick cock fill and stretch him and then he was biting his lip, bearing down on it hard enough so that it started to bleed.

 _Ow,_ he thought. _Ow, ow, fucking OW!_

 _Oh, you fucking... you_ stupid... _WHY would you_ do _that?! OW! OW, OW, OW!_

He shouldn't have expected anything less. Aziraphale had no experience with any of this; he was entirely uninitiated into the world of sex and he was a habitually greedy creature at the best of times. But the demon had known him to have some table manners at the very least and would have expected some of that traditional decorum to translate over into the bedroom.

To just drive on in like that... without pause or consideration. It hurt like absolute Hell. Mainly, Crowley supposed, because his body was not yet accustomed to it and Aziraphale's member was hardly what you might rate on the side of petite and the angel had been far from courteous and gentle.

What surprised him all the more was that he... he liked it. He liked that Aziraphale could not seem to wait but a single moment longer to lay claim to him and in a moment of ravenous passion, had yanked him down onto his waiting cock. It was everything that the timid angel had spent so very long holding at bay; that possessive hunger, the hesitancy in even so much as taking that first step forwards into the future in which they might share together. All of it obliterated in that one act alone. The act what finally joined them.

Aziraphale's arms trembled with the effort of keeping his weight off of Crowley's body. He did not move for a moment or so and the demon was starting to suspect that he may have already gone ahead and blown his load, until Aziraphale gave a shallow, experimental thrust of his hips and the demon was assured beyond doubt, that his desire was still the very much alive and kicking.

"Oh..." Aziraphale softly groaned, moving his hips again. His eyes slid shut and his lip dropped open, revealing his bottom row of teeth. "... oh my word... oh, that is sublime, darling..."

Crowley, eyes wide, gasping in time with each of Aziraphale's rapidly increasing and ever the more deepening thrusts; clung on for dear life with his legs.

"O-one word for it..." He said, still making every concerted effort to be cool about things. There was quite a bit of movement going on inside of him now and he still wasn't quite used to it. It felt a lot different to how the angels fingers had done and there was a slightly sharp stinging sensation from where he suspected Aziraphale's rough entry had torn him.

Aziraphale must have taken note of the tremor in Crowley's voice, because he opened his eyes now and turned his face towards him.

"Am I hurting you?" He asked, glancing his thumb over the cut Crowley had made to his bottom lip. The skin tingled as it healed over and the angel kissed away what little remained of the blood.

Crowley shook his head. "No." He said, which was not entirely true. He was hurting still but it was such a very sweet pain. And it was in fact, becoming less painful by the moment.

"Do you want me to stop?"

Crowley groaned, shaking his head all the more obstinately. "Fuck no."

"Good." Aziraphale said breathlessly, dropped himself down and resuming his kissing of Crowley's lovely mouth. He slid his tongue over the demons lips, exquisitely aroused by his having taken possession of both his beloveds orifices in the some moment.

He had never done this before but he understood the mechanics of how sex worked and the body seemed to know instinctually what it was that it wanted to do.

It wanted to thrust. It wanted to thrust very hard and very fast.

Crowley had imagined that the first time that he and Aziraphale made love, it would be much like the way in which couples in those dopey romance movies did. There would be music playing in the background, they would be slowly wending their way across one another's bodies with wide eyes, glancing together of fingers, palms and kisses to the insides of wrists. There would be candles, long, lingering looks, perhaps a glass of wine left forgotten on the bedside table. There would be a bed for that matter and sheets and symmetry and 'I love you's'.

There wasn't much in the way of 'I love you's'. In fact, the only word Crowley seemed capable of forming for at least the first couple of moments was 'Ah'. He did in fact, say 'ah' quite a lot. He strung it together to form a succession of 'ah's' what followed one after another like a series of Christmas lights being drawn insufferably from a storage box, never seeming to come to an end. He was starting to sound exactly like one of those service people on the television and finally had some context as to precisely _why_ they insisted on making so much noise.

It was not at all like Crowley imagined it to be. It was hard, and it was rough and it was wonderful.

Aziraphale was lost to pleasure, thrusting his ample cock repeatedly into Crowley's body as though wishing to punch a hole through to the other side of him. The pain had started to dim, paving the way for an intense sensation of euphoria that washed through Crowley and bore him up on a bow of pleasure which left his faculties spinning and reeling. He could hear himself loudly moaning and felt no shame in such a thing, for Aziraphale was making every bit as much noise. They were taking pleasure from one another and extenuating that pleasure into earthly vocalisations; lustful entreaties what were utterly replete with longing and desire, given form after the centuries spent in pause and prurient silence.

Crowley reached blindly about Aziraphale's waist, tugging at the base of his shirt, wanting desperately to feel the touch of the angel's skin. He bundled the fabric up out of the way, yanking the singlet so hard he was surprised it did not tear and was able to set his palms at long, blessedly last to the plains of Aziraphale's back.

He palmed the sweat drenched flesh, digging his nails into his spine, caressing and squeezing as the angel's lips worked their ever the more appreciated magic tricks upon the side of his neck. They were wrapped completely and unerringly about one another, the toes on Crowley's one bare foot clenched so tightly with each pious thrust that they were starting to hurt. The other one, still partway clothed by the resolute sock, dangled in the air, looking like a somewhat ridiculous and low budget puppet.

He kept each leg wrapped tightly up around Aziraphale's midsection, coiling about the angel's body as a somewhat unneeded assurance against his perhaps deciding to at some point rescind on the exchange. Something of which Aziraphale, quite clearly, had absolutely no desire to do.

Crowley pulled his knees up higher so as to position his feet against the hem of Aziraphale's trousers. He pushed down, sliding his toes in where needed so as to work them down onto the angels upper thighs. He dropped a hand from up underneath Aziraphale's shirt, taking the waistband of his boxer briefs and yanking them down, so as to expose his bottom.

He took a hold of one of the bare cheeks and squeezed, feeling it flex beneath his hand with every buck of Aziraphale's hips. His other hand held fast to the line of the angel's back, scratching and clutching and clinging on tight. He raised his legs again, adjusting his hips so as to feel Aziraphale's cock penetrate further and felt it perfectly alight to that sweet spot inside of him.

"Ah… ah, just there - just there!" He tilted his head back, panting soft solicitations towards the ceiling as the angel's lips continued to suckle the side of his neck. "Don't stop, sweetheart... please, don't stop..."

At the sound of Crowley's request, Aziraphale drew himself almost all the way out of the demon's sultry body; the body what undulated like an exquisite sylph beneath each plunge of his sex. He kept the very tip poised between the tight, succulent ring of flesh and proceeded to ever so carefully manoeuvre it in and out, forcing Crowley's body to open up to him over and over again. The grip of that muscle was extraordinary and Aziraphale gasped with each new insertion, somewhat startled by the then sharp slap he received to his left buttock.

"No!" Crowley snapped, digging his nails hard into the malleable flesh of the angels rump. His eyes were blazing with annoyance; his cheeks flushed and lips timorously parted. "Put it all in. Please..."

Realizing he had somewhat misinterpreted his lovers instructions, Aziraphale quickly slipped his hands underneath the demons body, taking hold of each nectareous globe of his bottom and pushing deeply back inside. Crowley gave a long, drawn-out hiss, then a moan what seemed to originate from about as deep down in the demons body as Aziraphale currently felt himself to be buried. He applied himself the further in stoking that internal fire, thrusting repeatedly into that place what brought Crowley once more to writhing upon the floor, turning his head from side to side, fingernails piercing hot, searing marks across Aziraphale's skin.

It was more than enough, given his complete lack of affiliation with so much as the anything resembling sex, that Aziraphale found himself poised on what he could only presume, was the very verge of orgasm.

" I can... I can feel... something..." He gasped, slightly alarmed at the unfamiliar sensation what was creeping up on him. It felt strangely like a deep and pervasive itch and for some reason that image of a boiling tea kettle came rushing back to the forefront of his mind.

Crowley did not make fun of him, such as the angel might have otherwise expected. He remembered all too well how taken aback he himself had been at his own first orgasm. It had been in the Garden of Eden in fact and had come as such a shock to Crowley that he had knocked himself out on the ground and came to perhaps a good round hour later, head buried in a bracket of fallen leaves and with his robe still hitched up around his waist. Small wonder that Aziraphale had not in fact wandered up on him during that time.

Crowley took one of Aziraphale's hands between his own, placing a kiss to his inside palm before then twining their fingers together.

"It's okay... Let it happen." He brushed his other hand over the angel's cheek before then reaching around to cup it to the back of his head. "It feels good. You'll like it."

"I should..." Aziraphale started to ease backwards, aware of what was intended to happen at the point of ejaculation and feeling it might have been a terribly disrespectful thing to do to the person he loved. Crowley clamped down hard with every muscle he had at his disposal and tightened his legs so hard about the angel's waist he would have put a corset to shame.

"No. Inside." He whispered, dropping the hand what had been tangled in the now damp flock of Aziraphale's hair and taking hold of the cheek of his arse once more. He pushed down, encouraging the angel to continue with his movements, digging his nails in and squeezing hard, groaning loud and deep as the angel gave credence to his breathy demand.

Aziraphale had never cum before. And Crowley wanted every single precious drop of it. He wanted the angel to reach that place of exquisite ecstasy inside of him; to pump that sumptuous cream into the waiting, sweltering channels of his body, to be greedily devoured and supped.

"Jussst let go..." The serpent instructed and with one final thrust, Aziraphale did just as he was bade.

Head tilted back, crying out towards the ceiling, he lost himself to the inexorable mercy of mortal pleasure, wings erupting from his back, tearing the bonds of his shirt apart so that ribbons of fabric were flung into the air.

A bookcase came crashing down as one of his wings collided with it, causing a domino effect which resulted in the rear most shelves taking out a street side window. Glass smashed outwards into the sidewalk, splintering down from beneath the drawn shades so as to form a pile upon the concrete.

Crowley barely took notice, he himself overwhelmed by the incomparable expression of pleasure on Aziraphale's face, the feeling of the angels shuddering, mindless thrusts; death throes what wrung the last few spurts of ejaculate from the tip of his twitching cock. The cock what was still buried deep up inside of him, what was filling him with the wondrous, tangible proof of his love.

Aziraphale's orgasm was enough to push Crowley over the edge and he came hard; the exceptional pleasure of his climax so intense that he near about broke his skull into several thousand pieces on the book into which he pitched the back of his head. The lustful moan what brokered from deep inside of him sounded like nothing what any human mouth might be capable of producing, but expressly more carnal and animalistic.

The build up of Crowley's desire erupted across the rise of his stomach, subsequent spatters reaching high enough so as to ingratiate themselves to the hair of his chest. It ran in rivulets down either side of his body, mingling with the generous trails of sweat, what further hastened its descent onto the covers of the books that were, without a shadow of a doubt, entirely unsalvageable.

The muscles inside of Crowley's body fluttered and contracted tightly as he came, gifting Aziraphale yet another remarkable wave of pleasure. He shuddered, arms trembling uncontrollably before, without offering so much as a reticent peep, he collapsed atop the demon like a deflated balloon, wings flopping down to the floor on either side so that they resembled those of a bird what had been the recently bundled up out of an oil spill.

The record player, having long since completed its rotation about the vinyl Crowley had chosen, filled the room now with the sound of its plaintive, questioning grumbles. A stray shard of glass, maintaining an admirable grip upon the wooden frame of the window pane, lost its battle and dropped, with a soft 'clink' to the pavement outside.

Aziraphale and Crowley, spent of their passion, lay entwined about one another on the floor; content in their blissful languor. There was a time for words, but this was not one of them. The silence was a good thing and they languished in the gift of it; aware of the extraordinary thing of which they had just shared.

Meanwhile, in Crowley's flat across town, another angel and a demon, having long since made a tangled, unsalvageable mess of black Egyptian cotton, were having rather the more awkward conversation themselves...

**~X~**

* * *

**_~Saturday - 27th of April, 11:13pm~_ **   
**_Scotland - Two miles out from Aberdeen Harbour..._ **

"Know anything bout cars, do ya?" Archibald Oakey, middle aged veteran and slayer of many a solid pint in his time and a long string of successes in enlightening virgins, tapped the side of his dirt encrusted boot against the equally mud encrusted wheel of his four-wheel drive. "Auto clubs well takin' its time."

The Man who Never Was had, in no way shape or form, done anything so as to purposefully ingratiate himself into this conversation. He had only just dragged himself up out of the sea some two and a half hours prior and had been wandering his way down along the path what he knew, by want of Patientia's guiding pull, to lead him towards... well, the wherever it was they were all intended to assemble.

The past few months had been long. He had learned some about the world of which he'd only barely touched upon in the days before his subsequent banishment. Had visited places such as France and Belgium. Had picked up on languages, mostly Italian, by want of the way in which he habitually acquired knowledge and accustomed himself, as much as was possible, to this vastly more complicated and ever the more by the moment, deeply infuriating place.

He had been walking along the road, practicing in fact the languages he had so far thusly attained, when he had stumbled up on the strange, hairy little man; who reeked far the more intensely of fish than even he, a creature what had just literally hauled itself out of the brine, could manage.

The human male, what had introduced itself as 'Archibald Oakey' did not seem to mind, nor take any particular stock in the fact that The Man who Never was, was strolling the midnight streets of rural Scotland in the stinking, rotting vestments of a Hazmat suit. A short sightedness of more the likely self-indulgent narcissistic traits what honestly came as a relief to the Man who Never was, as it would only have likely extenuated the conversation further and it was already an exchange what was far too involved so far as he was concerned.

"Is that what this _il aggeggio_ is called, _signore_?" He asked, staring through the hopelessly inadequate eyes of the human body he had accrued. "... a... cars?"

"Take that as a no then." Archie sighed, turning back towards the open hood and the still small plume of acrid smoke it was emitting. Should have known he wasn't likely to get any help from someone who got about dressed in an orange onesie and had a comb-over you could have performed a price check on.

"And what is its' _scopo…_ it's... I mean to say... it's... purpose, this... cars?" Asked the Man who Never was, feeling that there could well be some information he might glean from this otherwise pointless encounter. Judging from the fact that the bizarre contraption had circular accruements at the base of it, he could only suppose that it somehow rolled... which would further indicate that it would serve as some manner of transport.

"What, ye just crawl out from under a rock or somefink?"

 _"Something."_ The man Who had Never Been corrected, with ever increasing patents of irritation. Only a few months on earth and his grasp of spoken language was still every bit superior to that of the humans who had every reason to know better. "A very big rock, in fact. _Si_."

"Gets ya to where yer needin' to go." Archie explained, who had always been a sort of friendly lad. At least, that's what his mother used to say. He'd had enough drunken conversations in his time as well, to not pay too much attention to otherwise ridiculous and somewhat suspiciously abstract sounding questions. "Which this here clunker is currently _not_ doin'."

"Some primitive form of transportation then..." The Man who Never was clucked his tongue thoughtfully, glancing out into the never-never what was in fact the collective sum of the entire world. "You've been busy." He said, though it was not directed singularly at the officious smelling gentleman who continued to stare into the bosom of the car with the expectation that his patented glare would be enough to repair whatever it was that was wrong in the first place. "It is _rotto_?" And then, because the man looked confused, added: "Hmm... broken, I believe? It is... broken?"

"Well it's not movin', is it?" Archie was starting to feel the slightest bit jipped with the weird looking stranger and his even the weirder questions. The stranger who had now taken to circling the four wheeled drive with a shrewd look, which suggested he somehow knew about the bag of dope tucked away in the glove box and had every intention of getting to it.

"How does one go about _il funzionamento_ this 'cars'?" Asked the Man who Never was, who had no knowledge as to what marijuana was and would have considered the smoking of such a noxious weed to be an unapologetic and unnecessary waste of time. "When it is not broken?"

"What's with all the twenty questions, mate?" Archie was starting to feel very nervous about the amount of attention the stranger was paying both him and his car. What if he was a narc? He didn't need that sort of shit coming down on him. Jobs were hard to keep and never the mind what his mother would say if she caught wind of him being on the gear. "If yer not goin'a to help then piss off, a'right?"

The Man who Never was, sighed ostentatiously. "Well... one can't blame a Vice for trying." He said and unfurled the immense, skeletal stubs of what might have once housed voluminous feathers of black and white. Archie had little time to react to this, before one of these splintered, sharpened prongs jammed themselves into the side of his head, opening up a hole as wide as a tennis ball.

The Man Who Never was set his lips against this bleeding crater, excising the contents of the odorous mans head in three stout gulps and then permitted the body to fall to the ground with a meaty thud. He belched, covering his mouth with the side of his fist; a gesture he had picked up from one of the humans in France he had exacted this very act upon.

_"Grazie."_

He repaired the 'cars' with a wave of his hand. His powers were growing ever the stronger by the day and he knew full well, by the time he reached his Secondary further south, he would be as close to unstoppable as he had been in the days prior to his Banishment.

Having acquired the knowledge pertaining to motor vehicles from the head of 'Archibald Oakey', the Man Who Never was, stepped up into the drivers seat and turned the key in the ignition. He glanced down towards the exsanguinated body; appearing to sense caustic judgement in the now pinched, dehydrated features.

"Come now. Why the face? Your days were numbered, anyway."

He turned on the headlights, locked the doors and pulled out onto the road. Thanks to this unexpected encounter, he was now only hours away from getting to where he needed to be.

It was close at hand. After seven thousand years, he would finally taste the long awaited sweetness of justice served.

In the crimson glow of the rear view lights, the brainless body of Archibald Oakey shifted.

And rose.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: My dears, I have happy news! This officially marks the end of the original content updates and sparks the beginnings of the brand new chapters! The first of which, shall be posted tomorrow! (Runs around with her t-shirt pulled up over her head like a soccer hooligan).
> 
> Thank you once more to everyone for your patience; I have the loveliest readers a madam could ever ask for and I've had such a wonderful time tidying these chapters up! It honestly feels as though I have been out at sea a while and am finally swinging back into shore!
> 
> Thanks as always to those of you who have read, commented, kudoed, subscribed and bookmarked. You are all amazing and I'm so excited to kick on into 2020 with you all and bring some brand new stuff to the table! Until tomorrow then and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	54. (NSFW) Or, when all is sayd and fayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh my god, everyone; we did it! After a busy month of trucking and unintentional (and likely, very the much irritating) spamming, 12 ridiculously long chapters have long last become 53 much more manageable ones! (Hoists celebratory snifter of brandy and puffs pompously on a wooden pipe)
> 
> To all my original readers, thank you so much for your patience during this time and I'm sorry it has taken so long to get to this point. Subdividing truly was the very best decision for this story and to the very brave and caring reader who provided the feedback what led to this happening (you know who you are ;) thank you so much for having the guts to speak up. It's never easy, because we never know how someone's going to react to their 'baby' being second-guessed, but I am so genuinely relieved and touched that you did. I believe the story is a much more balanced and easier read, so thanks again!
> 
> Thank you as well to everyone who has read, kudoed, commented, bookmarked and subscribed in the past month! (I genuinely forgot that was a thing on here!) Your support warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart :)
> 
> On another random note, I have decided henceforth to eschew with the inclusion of summaries at the start of each chapter. I don't think they're necessary; they were just a copy paste of stuff that you end up reading in the story, anyway. I doubt anyone will miss them, but I thought I would just mention it all the same!
> 
> And now, without any the further ado, an actual brand new chapter! 
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> WARNINGS: The following content is NSFW and includes explicit sex scenes. … You know... just in case you didn't get enough of that the last update :)
> 
> Thanks again to all of you for being such amazing readers! Time to get this show back on the road!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 11:05pm~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London Soho...** _

_**Nine months to the apex...** _

"There's blood."

It was the first thing Aziraphale had said since the moment he had collapsed on top of Crowley. If not for the fact that he had been imparting such histrionically heavy breaths the whole while, the demon might have suspected that he had gone ahead and discorporated on the spot.

Crowley had done his best to be a good sport about it. He too, needed some time to recover and had contented himself the simply with laying there, arms about the angels' heaving body, basking in what he now understood to be that so often poeticized 'post-coital glow'. His own body occasionally twitching with the smallest and sweetest of after shocks, his brain wondrously numb and cloudy about the edges.

He wondered if he should to say something. What did one usually say in these moments? He somehow thought that the beseeching of a 'wahoo' might have been a little on the nose; though he rather felt the timing could not have been the more appropriate.

And so, he instead languished quietly in his contentment; brushing his fingers through Aziraphale's sweaty hair; caressing the individual feathers of his wings, squeezing the down covered bones. He was vaguely aware of the rather uncomfortable, sticky mess forming a rudimentary epoxy between them. It was likely to have suctioned Aziraphale's singlet to Crowley's bare chest and stomach.

The fabric itself had absorbed a great deal of heat, which condensed between their bodies so as to cultivate the sort of moist, subterranean ecosystem best suited for the laying of mosquito eggs, the formulation of Ross River virus and the hosting of leech symposiums. It was far from pleasant, and Crowley had taken to squirming in an attempt to alleviate some of the discomfort, reaching in so as to draw Aziraphale's singlet up and away from his flesh. The feel of the angel's bare, slippery skin against his own was a far more enjoyable sensation and Crowley felt a smile weave itself unbidden across his face, as his thoughts drifted back to tentative fantasies indulged that very afternoon.

Of the two of them, fucking on the floor of the bookshop, the sun streaming in through the windows to warm the already heated plains of their flesh. Of hands and fingers slipping and sliding across rosy skin, deluged by sweat. With lips and tongues and teeth, with nails dragging and digging, palms clenching, soft wanting breaths quickly transmuting into louder, hungrier moans, pleading for the hardness, the mercilessness of the taking.

The reality had been everything Crowley had ever imagined it to be. Had hoped for it to be. And then some.

Aziraphale was inside him still. His passions long since satisfied, the angels sex had returned now to a sedentary state and no longer stretched and probed Crowley as punitively as it had done so earlier. It rested now; rendered temporarily prone in the satiation of its covetous desires, accommodated further by the hugging walls of the demons slick, inner channels.

The fact that they were still joined overwhelmed Crowley with such intense feelings of love, that it invited the rare guest what were tears to the corners of his eyes. He kissed the side of Aziraphale's face; the face what was currently buried in the books what rested offside of Crowley's head. Lent his lips to his cheekbone, cooed soft, indeterminable utterances into the angels ear; murmurs what possessed nothing of substance in so far as language was concerned, but were nonetheless replete with praise and deep intensity of affection and love.

Crowley had nothing to compare it with, but he felt relatively certain, nonetheless, that Aziraphale was an absolutely exquisite lover. Even if he had been rough and careless at times, the demon attributed this predominantly to both lack of experience and to the angels subjectively intoxicated state. He would continue to improve with time and with practice.

Though he was still very tired and still very much immersed in the font of recovery, Crowley felt a twinge of excitement pinch its fingers into his groin. The thought that this moment- _this_ \- was only the first. The first of what could very well be the many, many more.

He would like for there to be a lot more. A lot, lot more. In a lot of different ways.

The door was open now. The final hurdle had been cleared.

With a weary sounding grunt that roused Crowley clear out of his fanciful imaginings, Aziraphale finally managed to ease himself up, arms shaking like a pair of poorly enforced load bearing pylons. His face was flushed and his eyes cloudy; as though he was fighting off a particularly virulent bout of the flu. He had the sort of glib, dazed expression what would not have been considered out of place on a person what had just been walloped around the head with a reproduction Ming vase.

In contrast to the greedy, somewhat heedless movements what comprised the definitive moments of their unification, Aziraphale took exceptional care now to withdraw from Crowley slowly. The demon gave a soft, dissuasive murmur at the parting; feeling emptiness impart now where the angel had so charitably filled him.

He had thought there might be some pain; his having assumed that the mess inside of him would have gone as tacky as that which coated his belly. But the easement felt mercifully natural, if not for a sharp, stinging sensation which caused him to flinch and bite his lip moments before the angel withdrew entirely.

That was when Aziraphale made mention of the blood.

He sounded a little panicky, which was not unusual, given that it was Aziraphale and he was an instinctively gentle creature; one who abhorred the very notion of his actions somehow or other bringing harm to bear against others. In particular, those to whom he harboured genuine feelings of affection.

Crowley took a glance between his legs, feeling his face flush for the sight with which his bleary eyes were greeted. Aziraphale was holding his penis in his hand, a view which most ordinarily would have sent the demons pulse to skyrocketing, if not for the worried look holding court upon the angels' face.

There were streaks of blood smeared along the length of the shaft, what had in turn rendered Aziraphale's ejaculate a sort of rosy, pink colour. The air had taken on a particularly unpleasant smell as well; sort of coppery, which made Crowley think that he was in fact bleeding quite a bit more than he had realized and feeling rather the contrarily surprised in his not having given the matter much thought. He was not a creature what was known for his ability to 'tough it out'. Some might go so far as to say he was a bit of an old ladies lavender silk handkerchief.

He gave a tired, disinterested sniff, managing to keep his legs uncomfortably elevated, out of respect for the very much desecrated books into which he had been so frenziedly driven. He would hardly have been surprised if, when he got up, the imprint of the words ' _Wind in the Willows'_ had been permanently enervated into the flesh of his arse cheek.

"Oh... yeah... yeah, think you mighta... um... torn me a little... when you first... got in there." It was such an inelegant way of describing the act, but even a demon could be forgiven for such things, when his brain was little more than a melting pot of serotonin, dopamine and tentatively formed fantasies as to how, where and more importantly _when_ the next referred 'act' would be taking place.

Aziraphale swept his hands under each of Crowley's knees and further elevated his legs so as to better expose his rather sore and swollen hole. The demon supposed he would never get used to this, no matter how many times it happened. It simply wasn't a position one could pull off with any degree of affable nonchalance. Just because he'd now had sex, did not mean that he had suddenly acquired some never before experienced confidence concerns the convention. It took a great deal of self-control not to drop his hand between his thighs and attempt to cover himself.

"Oh, my dear... oh my dear, I am so sorry." Aziraphale really did sound wretched and he took to ruffling frantically about in his vest pocket, yanking free his handkerchief and shaking it out of the neat little square into which it had been so meticulously folded.

He wiped tenderly through the crack of Crowley's arse cheeks, the material peaking into view whenever he glanced along the line of his perineum. There were small streaks of startling red adhered to the alabaster surface; which actually came as something of a strange relief to Crowley. Given where the angel was wiping, he was rather expecting another colour to put in an appearance. One which would have very likely caused him to discorporate into a pile of mortified soot on the spot.

It didn't seem like that much blood at all, really. He was very sore and achy, true, but he wasn't in a great deal of pain. Which was somewhat a surprise, given how enthusiastically Aziraphale had been fucking him.

The thought sent a jolt of excitement through Crowley's lazy mind. _Unholy shit... He was fucking me._

It hadn't been all soft romance and tenderness at all. No, it had been hard and passionate and hotter than Hell itself. Aziraphale had made up his mind that he was going to have Crowley that night and had taken him in the most astonishingly carnal, unabashedly possessive manner; fulfilling every desire he appeared to have long since been nursing and indulging those long withheld urges with neither hesitance nor shame.

Crowley wasn't at all sure what it was that Virtues placed value on, but whatever it was, he was certain he would be sending a surplus of it to Humanitas, along with an enormous 'Thankyou' card stuffed to the point of overflowing with money.

And a Mercedes. Also overflowing with money. And pink marshmallows.

"You should have said something." Aziraphale chided, aligning his hand with the crease between Crowley's buttocks. The demon felt a soft, warm vibration start to work its way through his body and he reached down so as to yank the angel's fussing fingers away.

"No," He said, running his thumb over the bone of Aziraphale's wrist. Giving the angel a very firm look. "I don't want you to heal it."

"But you must be in pain."

"I'm sore," The demon agreed. "Because of what we did. I don't want to take that away."

Crowley didn't mind the soreness. He didn't want to eradicate the physical proof of what they had done, what they had shared. Sure, it would probably hurt a Heaven of a lot more come tomorrow when he was sober, but he was more than content to reassess the matter then.

He didn't want to be rid of it just yet. The pain was the price of their having come together, and he wanted the reminder of it. Such was the mortal right of any what had surrendered their body to the venereal attentions of the person whom they desired.

Aziraphale stared at him a moment longer, his brows furrowed with worry and with guilt. As an afterthought, he retracted his wings, which sluiced their way up off of the floor with a heaviness what might have suggested they were being dragged out of a puddle. When they were tucked safely back out of sight within their immaterial pockets, Aziraphale took a clean portion of the handkerchief and used it so as to wipe off the length of his sex.

Crowley observed, fascinated by the motions. Aziraphale flinched a little whilst doing this, so the demon imagined he was still feeling sensitive and even perhaps receptive to the glancing touch of his own hand.

Likely the first time he had ever done anything like this; exempting when he was required to clean and or to wash. He would never have been required to go to so much effort on those occasions. The demon could not help but to smile; for Aziraphale looked to be rather concerned and a little bit frightened at the sight of his own cum. The fact that it was mixed in with Crowley's blood was certainly not helping him in coming to terms with it.

Crowley in contrast, reposed in groggy tranquillity; legs still spread revealingly apart and fingers trailing idly down the centre of his sticky chest. He watched as Aziraphale, thankless task gratefully dispensed with, tucked himself back into his trousers, rezipped and rebuttoned and then tugged down his shirt and vest.

The demon had partly expected him to have violently recoiled long before now, loudly and dramatically proclaiming something along the lines of 'Oh God, _WHAT_ have we _done?!'_ whilst in the midst of rending his aged vestments and beseeching the mercy of a deity what paid him about as much mind as a tree pays to the ants what are crawling along its trunk. And this would mostly have been taking the sorry state of his bookshop into account. But he did in fact appear remarkably calm, if a little more clinical and distant than the demon might have otherwise preferred.

With a cursory wave of his hand, the angel repaired the shop window and righted the bookcase what's corner was currently protruding out onto the street; stretching the blind out along with it. He glanced towards Crowley's foot and then, as something of an amusing afterthought, reached out, pinching the slackened toe of his sock and tugged it free; placing it down upon the floor with a greater deal more attention to detail than was altogether necessary.

Having restored some more the obvious matters to rights, Aziraphale pushed his fingers back through his hair and struggled, on tremulously trembling, baby dear like legs, onto his feet. He offered Crowley his hand.

"Come on. We should... go get washed up."

Crowley slipped his fingers into the waiting grasp of Aziraphale's and allowed himself to be heaved up off of the now sticky pile of books he had been utilizing as a mattress. He was certain there were any number of shapes delineated into the skin of his back and rump, from where corners and covers had been digging into him.

Aziraphale paused just long enough to wipe his handkerchief over the sticky mess clinging to Crowley's abdomen and stomach before leading him towards the bedsit.

Crowley felt very strange, traipsing through the bookshop without so much as a stitch to his name. He was also finding said job of 'traipsing' a little more challenging than usual, as he was very sore and being forced into a bizarre sort of half-limp, so as to take pressure off of a particularly disagreeable spot inside of himself. He got the impression that he might have been doing a rather amusing interpretation of a pirate with a peg-leg.

He wished Aziraphale had presence of mind to have fetched up his boxer shorts. Though he had done a decent enough job of cleaning him up externally, Crowley could now feel a couple of phlegmatic droplets coursing their way down along his perineum and break free to chart their course along the inside of his thighs. He reached back to wipe them away, but more broke free with every subsequent jolt of his body.

 _Not so straight forward, this sex thing,_ he thought vaguely. _Doesn't seem this messy in the movies. Where's the part where we curl up under the blankets and count the seconds between the thunder call and the lightening strikes? I don't remember all this fussing with a handkerchief... Well, maybe once in one of those service people shows but I seriously doubt that stay at home mum and the bawdy electrician were in love with one another..._

Upon stepping into the bedroom, Crowley suspected that Aziraphale would insist on them showering separately. The angel had always been on the modest side, and the only time Crowley had ever actually seen him naked, was when he was inhabiting Aziraphale's body and had been required to wash it.

Though they often bathed together in Crowley's _onsen,_ the angel would keep his underwear on and they did not shower together. They both had different heat preferences anyway and such an affair would have just resulted in significant discomfort (and blistered bits) on both parts.

As such, the demon was pleasantly surprised to find Aziraphale leading him, without hesitation, into the ensuite. He switched on the shower, keeping the water temperature cool (as the air in the shop was still unacceptably muggy and they had been very busy raising their own respective body heat) and then proceeded, without so much as a pause for celestial sensibilities, to disrobe.

He started with his shoes and socks, before sliding his pants down his legs. He didn't so much as fuss over the tears that his wings had left in the backs of his shirt and waistcoat, but repaired them with an itinerant wave of his hand, before folding them up and placing them on the sink.

Crowley dithered; keeping his legs and buttocks pinned tightly together as some means of waylaying the mess that was inside of him from leaking out. He had watched Aziraphale undress before of course, but only down to his undergarments. This was something new.

They might very well have just gone and made love but the angel had kept most of his clothes on throughout the exchange and only now were most of those clothes actually coming off. Crowley watched, whetting his lips with his tongue as the singlet was cast aside; displaying a broad expanse of back what was freshly bedecked by long, red scratches. A bestowment by way of Crowley's fingernails; fingernails what had gripped and scratched in response to the angel's deep, luscious thrusts up inside of him.

They were on the cheeks of his arse as well, Crowley observed, as Aziraphale dropped his boxer briefs, stepped out of them and placed them on the sink alongside his other somewhat less than fastidiously folded garments.

It was the first time Crowley was seeing him properly naked. By his own volition, mind. When the angel turned to face him, the demon found his eyes being drawn, almost magnetically, to his sex. The sex what had, until minutes earlier, been filling him so perfectly. Had been plunging and stretching and stroking up against those exquisite bundles of feel good nerve endings.

Every inch of it had been up inside of him. _Every inch._ No wonder Crowley felt sore.

He thought Aziraphale might try and cover himself, but the angel was apparently unconcerned at the moment with so banal a thing as modesty. He placed his hands to each of Crowley's shoulders and proceeded to guide the demon towards the shower bay. Crowley hesitated, certain that his groggy, post coital brain was negating something important.

He had heard the girls talk about it at work before. Something you were supposed to do immediately after having sex... Chloe had forgotten to do it once, and she had subsequently spent most of her shift dashing off to the toilet and complaining about stinging and having to make a doctors appointment for antibiotics...

"Wait... I uh... I need to..." Crowley eased himself out from underneath Aziraphale's hands and limped his way back over to the toilet.

He remembered now: he needed to urinate. This was what Alice had been scolding Chloe for having not done; because it flushed all the bacteria and whatnot out of your system, so that you didn't contract a UTI. A lot of elderly women in the home had the same issue apparently; though not from having too rough a sex. Or so Crowley could only hope.

He raised the immaculately polished toilet seat and stared down into the chemically treated blue rinse water waiting below. He had been drinking a lot that night, and his bladder felt even the more ready to expunge itself on result of the consequent battering his lower vicinity had taken, but he couldn't bring himself to take a piss in front of the angel.

They may have been a few stitches short of being literally joined at the hip, but there were some things they did not in fact share and watching one another go to the toilet was one of them. Crowley had once waited outside of the lavatory for Aziraphale, to which the angel then suggested they start spending a little more time apart but hey, it wasn't as though he'd had his ear up against the door listening.

"Could you, um... go into the other room for a minute?" Crowley asked, shifting his weight from left foot to right as the pressure on his bladder significantly worsened. He heard Aziraphale tut rather impatiently from behind him.

"Oh, for goodness sake... if you need to wee, just wee." The angel advised, as practical as ever. Crowley snorted a little, for hearing the act of urination described as 'weeing'. "I'll hop into the shower. You needn't worry about me looking. I assure you; I'm not yet that bored."

Crowley waited until he heard the glass door of the shower bay click shut behind Aziraphale and took a quick glance to make sure the angels back was to him. Reassured that he was somewhat safe, and that the water from the showerhead ought to have drowned out any of the noises he was making, he relaxed his bladder and urinated into the bowl. His urine was a little cloudy and a suspiciously dark colour what ascribed to be traffic cone orange in the event of Crowley's human kidneys forming lesions.

"You need to come and take a piss as well." Crowley called out to Aziraphale, shaking himself off and reaching out to flush the toilet. He supposed it wouldn't matter, given that the shower was currently running on cold anyway.

"I assure you, I do not." Aziraphale said, who was scrubbing so vigorously at his chest with a bar of soap that he appeared to now be wearing a very short dress composed entirely of bubbles.

"You're going to get a urinary tract infection. You're probably more likely to get one, actually. Because, you..." He stopped short of saying 'because you were the one inside of me'. He had cleaned himself thoroughly by way of magic prior to Aziraphale penetrating him, but it wasn't as if magic could destroy all bacteria. It was more surface detail, really.

Aziraphale opened the shower door and stuck his face out through the gap. His pupils, Crowley noted, were still very wide and he wondered if it was high time (appropriate terminology, considering) that they flushed the MDMA from their system. It would be next to possible to get to sleep with all that stimulant running through their veins, and Crowley was reasonably certain that he could do with a nap the sooner rather than later.

"Crowley. I am cleaning myself. You were clean, I was clean. I wager the chances are slight." He opened the door wide, extending one foamy hand and taking the demons fingers into his own. "Come on, now. Let's get you washed up."

Crowley stepped up into the shower bay and eased the door shut behind him. Feeling contrarily weary, in spite of the stimulant, he rested his cheek, chest and thighs against the cool tiles of the shower wall; groaning softly as the heat started to ease its way out of his body. Bless his reptilian bio-rhythms. Made it such a mother-fucking chore to get comfortable when the weather shifted from one extreme to the next.

He leant his weight into the wall, permitting the angel to fuss to whatever extent he so wished to fuss. Aziraphale took up the bar of soap from the shower caddy, lathered it between his hands and proceeded to scrub clean the both of them, washing soothing cold water up over Crowley's back, so as to bring his core temperature down. The languid, massaging hands of the angel felt ever so bully and much like any human male after successful love, Crowley battled the overwhelming urge to simply go ahead and drift off to sleep.

"Would you like for me to clean inside of you, darling?" Aziraphale's soft voice issued from beside his ear. He felt the ever so light touch of the angel's finger as proof as to what 'inside' he was referring. He had already cleaned the outside, which was admittedly a bit of an odd feeling but a nonetheless pleasant one.

Crowley shook his head. "No."

"But I made... Oh, I made such a terrible mess." The angel sounded as though he were on the verge of weeping. He must have been more upset by the blood than Crowley realized. "Please, Crowley. It can't be pleasant for you. Having all that... that _muck_ inside of you."

Crowley lifted his cheek up out of the grouting and managed to peer from between the cracks of his very heavy eyelids.

"Oi. None of that." He reached down to where one of Aziraphale's hands were cupped about his waist. He pressed his fingertips through the indentured valleys' of each knuckle. "It's not muck, angel. Far from it. It's your love what's inside of me. Your _love._ I don't want that washed away."

"My... love..." Aziraphale murmured softly, testing out the word as though to make sense of it. Having concluded that it was far the more reasonable and more importantly, reassuring, he leaned in, pressing a kiss to the back of Crowley's shoulder. "Yes, my darling. My sweetest, dearest of hearts, yes. I filled you with my _love."_

 _You certainly did_ , Crowley thought, metaphorical tongue somewhat lodged in cheek. He sighed as Aziraphale cupped his hands about his midsection, pressing up against his back, so that not a shred of daylight might be sourced between them. _It's probably the first time in all creation that an angel has cum. Inside the body of a demon, no less._

It seemed fitting, that not a drop of that ethereal ejaculate was wasted. Crowley liked the feeling of Aziraphale's seed buried deep up inside of him. He resented the knowing that second by second it was draining away; to slipping free, drop by drop down to follow the gushing of the water what enveloped their weary bodies.

He traced his hands back over Aziraphale's forearms, leaning into his embrace. The first time they had touched bare skin to skin. Crowley could feel Aziraphale's chest hair pressing and tickling the hallow of his back, the cradle of his thighs against his buttocks, the subtle intrusion of his sex between each of the cheeks.

He turned in the angels hold, slid his arms about his slippery body and pulled him in close. The touching of their skin felt so perfect; so strangely and intensely nourishing. As though his flesh had been screaming out for sunlight, and only now was he stepping out of the darkness and feeling the warm fingers of the day weave their path across his body.

Aziraphale blocked the spray of the shower. Droplets of water bounced off of the back of his head like tiny hailstones, the main force of the spray pounding into the centre of his back. His hands stroked the sides of Crowley's chest before moving up to cup and massage his shoulder blades. He brought him into a kiss; sliding his tongue across Crowley's bottom lip before feeding it back inside of his waiting mouth. There was an intensity of hunger underlying the nature of the kiss; as though Aziraphale had not in fact, only minutes earlier, satisfied his corporeal appetite.

Crowley felt the angels sex prod the inside of his thigh and he eased back just enough so as to stare down at it.

"Well... hello again." He said, not really knowing what else to say. Neither one of them should have been able to have gotten it back up in so short an order. From Crowley's experience, there was usually at least a good half hours respite required between coming and being able to go again (in so far as he had learned from his infrequent forays into the realm of self-pleasure) and it had so far been, at least from what he was able to glean, fifteen minutes at best.

But then he recalled his experience back in the sixties when he had taken two tablets of MDMA in the one go, and had been unable to dispense with his subsequent erection until he had gone and magicked the drugs out of his system. This was very likely to have been a side effect of the tablet Aziraphale had earlier taken; locking his body into a heightened state of sexual arousal.

"As though you are one to talk," The angel said, reaching between them so as to glance his palm over the underside of Crowley's cock. The demon took a quick, shuddery breath.

"Guesss we're, uh... making up for... lossst time..." He moaned softly as Aziraphale's hands rubbed over his buttocks and the backs of his legs. Felt one of the angels fingers press to his pucker and that warm, shuddering sensation ease its way up through his inner channels; the feeling of something knitting back together, an easement of muscles. The aching vanished, much to his annoyance. "I told you, I didn't want you healing that!"

His protests terminated off into a deep, throaty grasp and he was driven up onto the tips of his toes, as Aziraphale's finger plunged its way back inside of him. It was slickened enough by the water, so as not to cause pain upon its intrusion; which was a relief, as the angel had pushed himself in about as far as he could go.

"I mean to take you again..." Aziraphale's breath was hot against Crowley's ear; his tone a firm, unwavering indictment of his intentions. "I can't have you hurting while I'm making love to you. And I'm afraid it is simply impossible for me to wait until you have healed naturally."

"Selfish... bastard..." Crowley remarked, smiling nonetheless as the angel proceeded to carefully reinsert his finger, adding the second in short order so as to initiate the delicate process of stretching him out. "Always knew you were... greedy, but..."

"Perhaps I am simply 'making up for lost time'?' Aziraphale paraphrased, his eyes sparkling with some manner of mischief Crowley had only ever rarely stumbled across in all the long years of their acquaintance. His lips lightly pressed to the mark he had made upon the demons neck earlier. He nuzzled it, eased wanton breaths into the swelling. "You look beautiful beneath the spray of the water, my darling. How do you imagine I can possibly resist you when you look so scrumptious?"

"Oh, for fucks- don't say I look... scrumptious!" Crowley said, cringing once more at the angels repeated insistence on injecting ridiculous words into ordinary conversation. He yelped as Aziraphale slipped his fingers free, sliding both hands in now to cup to each cheek of Crowley's arse. He lifted him, the slick tiles of the shower wall sliding against his back as his heels came up off of the floor.

Crowley had a vague idea as to what to do in this situation and attempted to swing his legs about Aziraphale's waist; the ungainly result being his feet smacking up against the glass door, pushing it free of the jam so that it swung out and let a waft of warm air enter the shower bay.

He hadn't long in which to think on this, before he felt the prod of Aziraphale's erection. The angel was using his hands to keep Crowley's arse cheeks spread apart; more the likely as a means to open him up more fully for the initial act of penetration. The demon experienced yet another sharp flush of concern. Almost the entirety of his weight would be resting down on Aziraphale's cock, which meant that it was likely to go in much further and even harder than it had done so earlier.

"Those sounds that you made..." Aziraphale murmured, nuzzling his lips into Crowley's neck. "Those soft moans... those whimpers..." The head of his sex rubbed up against Crowley's entrance in what was more the likely an unintended tease. "Oh, they drive me mad..."

"Yeah?" Crowley asked, giving a nervous chuckle. He had thought he sounded a bit silly, from what he could remember. Sort of like an angry monkey, jumping up and down on a branch, screeching impotently at the misappropriation of its banana. Which hardly seemed to him a sexy sounding vocalization, but to each their own.

Aziraphale leaned back, and Crowley felt his chest tighten at the intensity of the angels eyes; a palpitating hunger, hemmed by what he might almost have ascribed to anger. He was not at all certain what a more appropriate comparison might be, but one thing he knew for certain was that Aziraphale was staring at him in that particular way he had, when he was expecting his words to be obeyed.

"Push yourself up against the wall," He said firmly, leaning the weight of his body into Crowley as some manner of incentive. "Like you do when you're sleeping."

Crowley was admittedly intrigued, but he was also never one to avoid making a point of something. Especially if said point had been levelled at him from every conceivable direction with a punitive waggling of metaphorical finger.

"Bit of a waste of magic, don't you think?" He asked, the corner of his lip twitching. Aziraphale went to no particular effort to look amused. His eyes stared piercingly out from beneath the wet and bedraggled curls of his white hair; most of which had formed into tight ringlets across the lines of his forehead.

"Just do it." He said, and in such a no-nonsense, authoritarian tone that it made Crowley's stomach clench with excitement. He had no idea just what was going through Aziraphale's head, and where in fact this particular personality had been shelved all these long years, but he was certain that he was enjoying every blessed moment of it.

It was a bit of magic what did not require him to pull up power from down below, but one of which Crowley could naturally execute through simple force of will. He pushed back into the wall, eschewing gravity and clung to the tiles with as much veracity as a nifty bullet hole decal to the drivers side window of a 1933 Bentley. Doing so took most of his weight off of Aziraphale in the process, which he considered a fortunate thing, as he wasn't yet practiced enough at sex so as to feel comfortable with pretty much sitting straight down on the angels dick.

Aziraphale reached up, taking hold of Crowley's wrists. His breaths deepening, he positioned them to either side of the demon's face and set a nudge to each of his elbows.

"Put your arms above your head." He whispered, a sense of urgency entering his tone. Amused, Crowley obediently raised his arms above his head, pushing them back into the wall and easing free the strain by using magic so as to pin them in place; wrist over wrist.

"What the Heaven has gotten into you?" He murmured, watching with some amusement as Aziraphale's eyes lathered over every inch of his body; his tongue appearing briefly so as to swipe over the plump pillar of his lower lip. He looked as though he were considering taking a bite out of the demon at any moment.

He instead satisfied himself by palming his hands across the length of Crowley's chest and abdomen. Leaned in to lavish his tongue against his nipples, already pert from the cool glance of the shower water. His mouth felt very hot where it came into contact with the demon's skin and his tongue and teeth felt even more incredible.

Crowley squirmed, the underside of his sex rubbing and abrading against Aziraphale's plump belly. He could feel the tip of the angels cock continue to rub and tease the newly healed pucker, and was somewhat more the surprised to realize just how much he wanted it. How he moaned, void entirely of shame and rubbed back against the eager, insatiable horn; wanting it to press him apart once more, split and divide and complete him.

"Part your legs." Aziraphale instructed, digging his nails into the firm globes of Crowley's buttocks. The demon quirked a brow at him, somewhat curtly. Having every intention, in spite of the nature of the circumstances, to tease.

"They're already apart."

Aziraphale brokered the distance between them, taking Crowley's bottom lip between his own and drawing on it. "Wider..." He breathed into the demon's mouth.

Crowley parted his legs, taking his knees and thighs away from Aziraphale's waist in the process. He felt the stretch work its way down through his hamstrings, pull against his hips. But he was flexible, and this was child's play so far as execution was concerned.

He had never felt more the exposed to anyone in his entire life, and yet the look of desire what stole domain of Aziraphale's features whilst observing his movements... the way in which his eyes dropped covetous shades so that he appeared to be foundering under the intense weight of his passions, negated Crowley's self-consciousness entirely.

"Wider." The angel instructed, and the demon obeyed; parting his legs to such a dramatic degree that he felt very much as a butterfly must have done having been pinned to a display board. His knees were almost touching the glass to either side of the shower bay. He thought he must have looked positively ridiculous, and yet Aziraphale was staring at him with such hunger and reverence that another sensation overtook Crowley entirely. One which encouraged him to wipe free those useless, unhelpful crumbs of embarrassment and to instead take full ownership of the apparently desirable scene what Aziraphale was luxuriating in.

"Perfect..." The angel murmured, a smile gracing his lips as he carefully maneuvered himself into position. Placing one hand on the pale underside of Crowley's thigh, before reaching up and taking the demon's firm chin between his thumb and finger. He guided Crowley's head down, so that his gaze was directed towards the menial space what persisted between them. "Now... _watch._ "

A demons heart was not required to beat, and yet Crowley's proceeded to thunder within the cavern of his chest with such veracity that it sent aftershocks rippling out to each of his pulse points. He watched, unable to look away even if he had presence of mind to do so, as the angels thick cock eased slowly and sensually out of sight, slipping inch by gradual inch up inside of his pliant body.

It pushed a long, low moan out from between the demon's lips, his fingers clenching into fists against the slippery tiles above his head. Aziraphale's thrusts slid his back and buttocks up and down the shower wall, his thumbs and hands grazing the tender plains of Crowley's inside thighs as he filled the demon once more with the unequivocal proof of his everlasting love.

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April~** _   
_**Sunny Sanctum Hotel - London Mayfair...** _

Gabriel would have liked to have held them longer.

It seemed the expected thing, from what little he understood regarding human copulation.

They made love. They lay together. Ones head would be resting upon the others chest; fingertips trailing across exposed flesh, still slickened by the perspiration of efforts long since exhausted.

Soft murmurs, perhaps. Entreaties proffered. Insecurities assuaged. Feelings affirmed.

So he would have imagined. He had no means of knowing how any of this was supposed to have gone. The body had operated under its own self-guidance system, and he had simply been the hapless passenger who was nonetheless in great awe of the journey.

It was the closeness what he had enjoyed the most.

It had been so long since he had been close to anyone.

He had wanted to savour it; to flesh it out in the silence what followed in the culmination of their mutual passions. To be both close and to be silent with one another. Comfortably silent, much as they once had been, but closer still than Heaven had ever permitted.

But the demon what had once been Raphael had no interest in prolonging the moment. They had been generous enough, so they believed, in permitting Gabriel to enter their body; even though their own climax had long since been achieved and there was no earthly reason as to why they were required to assist him with his own.

Having done so, Beelzebub had rested perhaps less than a minute atop Gabriel's toned body, (predominantly rendered for aesthetic purposes alone, they gathered) painfully aware of how wispy the hair was on the crown of their head and how the Archangel was surely coming to terms with just how little they did in fact resemble the illustrious creature they had once been.

Whatever spell held sway over them was now the mercifully drained away, its purpose satisfied, and Beelzebub sought quickly to extricate themselves from the dregs.

They were a strong creature, not given over easily to discomfiture or pain, but even they were forced to bite their lip as they eased themselves slowly and carefully off of the Archangel's now flaccid sex organ. It was, such as they had expected it to be, unnecessarily large and quite a bit of lubricant had been required so as to create a buffer against the pain.

Gabriel felt as though he ought to say something. He had been watching the whole time, after all, and it seemed a horrid thing; seeing that long, thick column of corporeal flesh slip out of the demons tiny body. There was in fact some blood from what he could see and he wanted to ask whether they were all right, but Lord Beelzebub had not a care as to the archangel's burgeoning sensibilities. They negated all quandary on the matter, swinging themselves over the side of the bed and landing on their short, thin, shuddery legs.

They ripped the upper most sheet off of the bed with such force that it very nearly barrel rolled Gabriel onto the floor, wrapping it swiftly about the feminine attributes they had applied in the very moments the Archangel had set them upon the mattress.

Satisfied that they were somewhat satisfactorily shielded from curious celestial eyes, the Lord of the Infernal regions marched their petite frame over to the health code violation what doubled as a hotel bathroom, scooping up clothes off of the floor with the hand what wasn't keeping the modesty sheet pinched shut.

They slipped out of sight, closing the door behind him and twisting the lock in their wake; a very much definitive gesture which said that they were not to be followed under any circumstance.

Gabriel, hair mussed to a indecorous degree and eyes protruding as though having witnessed the accumulative horrors of the world, struggled up so as to rest against the insubstantial bracket of Styrofoam stuffed pillows. He stared down at the length of his very much naked human body; at the condition in which it had been left and battled once more with a degree of indecisiveness what was uncomfortably foreign to a habitually self-assured archangel.

 _What had he done? What had_ they _done?_

Why? Why had they done it? What could possibly have possessed them to surrender to such topographical impulses?

To be close, was one thing. To be so close that you were so much as wallowing about within the skin of the affiliate person was another matter entirely!

Gabriel would very much like to have showered himself, but he was hardly about to go forcing his way into a bathroom what had been definitively and unquestionably closed off to him. Operating very much under the heavy blanket of dazed disorientation, he instead reached across to the bedside table and tugged free a handful of tissues from the box what's very presence there seemed ostensibly on the nose.

He cleaned himself up as best he could, finding it a confronting process. There was much in the way of 'gross matter' with which to be dealing and he once more marvelled at just how distasteful the corporeal condition truly was. How were humans able to cope with it all? Going about their business, day by day, festering in the filth of their own bodies. A composite of pulsing meat, gurgling organs, swilling bags of conflagrating juices, bile and chemicals. If you were to compose a physical cage out of such things, calling it 'grisly' would be an understatement.

Gabriel hurriedly tossed the crumpled tissue paper onto the bedside table and worked quickly so as to inter himself beneath the scratchy coverlet; what had been, until now, residing at the base of the bed like a fibreglass encrusted slug. He had pushed it out of the way with his feet earlier; finding it unnecessarily prickly on the buttocks. It was hardly any better whence being reapplied to particularly sensitive body parts, but it was preferable to having to lay there, staring in bewildered shock at the tableau that was his weak and shameful human body.

Now that the thing was done, Gabriel was finding all sorts of conflagrating emotions piling up in his head like a late afternoon fender bender on the M25.

It had made sense at the time, to reach out to Beelzebub. At least... he had supposed there to have been sense in it.

He'd wanted to kiss them. He'd wanted to be close to them. Their human bodies simply had other means by which to interpret and expand upon that sentiment. Systemically more... intimate, fluid transfusing means.

He knew that he loved Raphael - _had_ loved Raphael - and felt still that deep, intrinsic pull towards the being what they had become. Had felt that gaping cavern that their absence had left in his existence, and how being in their company lately had only made the pain of it all far the more difficult to avoid.

It had made sense, at the time. But now that the wave upon which he had been riding had come to crashing down upon the distant shore, Gabriel was all too aware of the surrounding scenery and to him it was foreign and alien and the edges much too distinctly sharp and confounding.

They had made love. Or, more specifically, he had made love to a demon. And this was not a thing what one simply expunged from the timeline and gleaned over.

There were no policies around such things. It was something of which was so abundantly obvious to the angels of Heaven that to enforce a hard and steady ruling around such an unlikely happenstance was considered to be laughable at best. Offensive, at its standard.

Angel's did not possess earthly desires. They were a divine transcript of love and compassion, certainly, but that natural imbuement of celestial affability did not transmute over into wanton requirements of the living flesh.

To descend to such an act... it was surely a transgression of the highest order.

No better than what a human might do.

Gabriel had always been in control. He wasn't like Aziraphale. He was a being what was capable of denying whatever meagre impulses might have been impertinent enough so as to lift its snout and take an arbitrary whiff of the passing breeze. He could quash a contrary thought with the minimalist of efforts.

How could he have surrendered so easily? What had compelled him?

What had compelled Lord Beelzebub, for that matter?

And what did it mean in the long term? If everything was to be resolved so far as God and the Contingency plan was concerned, was this transgression enough so as to see him permanently expelled from Heaven? Gabriel himself had gone to considerably greater extremes in 'correcting' Aziraphale's behaviour, and they had so far only known for him to have been fraternizing with the enemy - never the mind copulating with them.

Gabriel's mind drifted temporarily and perhaps beneficially from the terrible anxiety he was experiencing. Took him back instead, to those memories what were still proximate to the source from which they stemmed.

His fists tightened about the scratchy folds of the cheap, economy brand curtain what was poorly attempting to pass for a bedspread. His toes curled slightly in upon themselves. They felt still a little cramped; for he had been curling them with far the greater vexation only ten minutes prior.

They hadn't really known what they were doing; either of them, but they had taken great and determined strides in figuring it out. The bodies desires served as ever the more useful guides and whatever impulse had drifted into the forefront of Gabriel's mind, he had simply projected outwards into the physical.

What had started out with the innocence and simplicity of kisses, had quickly turned to something more. Clothes were far too much in the way of inundation and they sought to remove them with such a dramatic flurry of vestments that it was little wonder Beelzebub had been required to trek as far as they had in search of their garments.

They had rendered themselves physically female for the act of joining. Gabriel had nothing in the means of experience with either biological sex and supposed he would not have minded what they had chosen. His desire would have remained much the same. Perhaps Beelzebub had thought they would be more comfortable, given that the body of a human female was capable of self-lubrication. It hadn't mattered much, anyway; they were still required to magically instil more. Gabriel's sex being about as showy and unnecessarily engorged as was to have been expected of someone who held himself in the very highest of regard.

Gabriel had remembered thinking just how tiny and vulnerable was the body belonging to the Lord of the Infernal Regions. And how this thought had, for whatever the reason, only piqued his arousal to greater extremes still. Caught betwixt a swirling vortex of love and passion, he had applied his lips to the swelling of each small breast, caressing large palms across pale plains of skin, moving with the flow of where the bodies tide was taking him.

He'd had a stray thought that the demon what had become referred to as The Lord of the Flies would be in possession of a distasteful smell; one associated with decay and rot. All things what flies and similarly loathsome parasites were want to commune. But then, he had never observed such a thing in the time they had so far been required to spend in one another's company. Nothing changed in the removing of their clothes. Their human body, though small and pale and patchy in places served in no way so as to dim the verdancy of his desires.

He remembered the soft, velvety ken of their inside thighs... the transmuting of barely muffled whimpers as his kiss lent itself to their untouched centre. Small fists rendering his once neatly styled hair into a conflagrate birds nest what would have dismantled even the sturdiest of combs what thought themselves up to the task of taming it.

And in itself, the taking... The passing thought as to whether their tiny body would be able to cope with it. Concerns and queries what quickly turned to wash at that first, incomparable sensation of being enveloped and tugged and squeezed in warm, wet, hugging chambers.

There was a good reason why such things were considered sinful. Gabriel now, much to his contestable chagrin, had some understanding as to just how Aziraphale had become so deeply enamoured by the corporeal condition. Those... sublime, euphorial sensations... what could only be experienced whilst dwelling within the construct of a human body... There was simply nothing what existed in Heaven what could compare to the exquisite intensity of it.

It was a void. A shallow, vacuous offer what failed in abject comparison to the delights of the physical world.

It was not an angels place to question. Nor to feel cheated. And Gabriel found himself doing and feeling a lot of these very things.

He was snapped from his thoughts with the sort of violent start what might best be compared to a high-strung person hearing a balloon popped distressingly close to their ear, as the bathroom door creaked open. Beelzebub had left the water running (such as was to be expected of a demon) and was now dressed quite as completely as they ordinarily were; reaffixing their hat so that the balding patches astride their scalp were assiduously veiled. They paused a moment so as to tug out one of their shirt sleeves, ensuring the other remained buckled underneath the arm of the jacket and took a glance in the wall mirror to make bad and certain that their neck tie was sitting perfectly asymmetrical.

Satisfied that all was out of order, the Lord of the Infernal regions cast the barest and briefest of glances towards Gabriel's still shell shocked expression.

"Thiz..." They began, with the forced air of one whom was doing everything in their considerable power so as to not appear rankled by recently established poor decisions. "-didn't happen."

Gabriel clearly considered these words to be somewhat the concerning ones. His handsome face wrinkled about the peripheries and he stared up at the demon in genuine confusion.

"I... think you'll find that it did." He said, thinking it very odd that a creature what retained extraordinarily intricate recall of things what happened over seven thousand years ago, could not recall the substantially transformative happenstance what had barely concluded only the six or so minutes prior.

Beelzebub groaned, turning back towards the bed so that the cold blaze of their eyes could strike some common sense up from the considerably barren well what the Archangel had at its disposal.

"Why do you angelz insizt on being so God damned literal all the time? You know what I mean."

Gabriel took a moment to consider this. It was a difficult equation for a historical surface skimmer to put together, but a few months spent in earthly subterfuge had taught him a thing or two. It would be a kindness to suggest it was far the more than two, however.

"You would prefer for us to... pretend that it did not happen?" He asked, still as to not entirely certain that this was the nature of the appeal. Beelzebub, patience barely clinging by an obstinate thread, gave him a long, unappreciative and ostensibly glowering look.

"Yes." They said, with the bluntness of a second graders HB pencil. "I would prefer."

"But that would be lying." Gabriel said, furrowing his brows at the demon. Stupefied that they could ask such a thing of him. Whatever it was he had done and whatever else might have been in store for him, he was still in that very moment a denizen of the Heavenly realm. They might as well have suggested that he rob a bank, or leave a five percent tip or something equally as deplorable.

"Call it being dizcreet then, whatever you prefer!" Beelzebub yanked up each of their shoes from two separate locations and slammed them onto their feet with the same delicate attention a farrier demonstrates to the hooves of a horse. "We don't have time for thiz right now. There are more the important matterz what require addrezzing." They yanked the laces of one of the shoes tight enough to near about bisect their foot and indelicately whipped the material about to form an uneven knot. "Firzt thing tomorrow, we are going to the angelz shop."

"Aziraphale asked... well, demanded would be the more appropriate word-"

"I couldn't give a bless-zing what the angel wants, Gabriel! More of theze Vicez and Virtuez are gathering in London by the day. We are running out of time." Beelzebub snapped one of their laces in their frustration and cast it aside with an impatient snarl. "We sit the pair of them down and we make them lizten. Enough of thiz pussy-footing around!" They straightened up, turned back to him and flinched their eyes shut; catching far too much of a glimpse of still shiny naked chest with which to know what to do with. "Speak of thiz, to no one."

"I understand." The Archangel said, which was a generosity entirely unexpected given what Beelzebub knew of Gabriel's limited personality. "I can be discreet when required." Gabriel further disarmed them in softening his expression, such that he looked to be genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of the creature he both opposed and had, in more recent settings, superimposed. "Are you all right?"

"I am perfectly fine," Beelzebub replied, their voice and their face a complimentary blank. "There iz nothing for you to concern yourself with." They reached down to where their carry bag was resting against the chipped table leg and dropped the strap down over their narrow shoulders. "I have work what needz tending to. 8:00am tomorrow, meet me outside of the bookstore."

"Very well. I will, uh... I'll see you then."

Beelzebub looked as though they might have wanted to say something more, but then the wisely, thought the badder of it. They turned, yanked open the hotel room door and departed; leaving Gabriel alone with his thoughts and a mini-bar tab what he would consider to have been unreasonably high for two standard drinks and one small bag of macadamia nuts.

**~X~**

* * *

Lord Beelzebub would not waste time in giving the matter much thought.

It had been a... pleasant physical distraction. That was it.

That was all it could be.

If only the archangel had not said those words... those words what had weakened their resolve in the first place...

It made no difference. The betrayal had not lessened for want of Gabriel's human desires. Nothing could. The depth of his disloyalty tracked deeper groves than the lowest rings of the seven circles of Hell itself.

They would be a fool to give themselves over to him again. He had proven just how easily swayed his love was. God may have cast her eyes away from him now, but the second he was back in Her favour, was the second he all too readily cast aside any of the supposed precious moments he might have shared with Beelzebub in the interim.

He was faithless. He was contrary.

He was not to be trusted.

Lord Beelzebub met with Duke Hastur in a discreet alleyway in a quiet, residential street of the sleepier end of the Mayfair junket. The Duke rolled in, somewhat more the surprisingly dishevelled than usual; eyes bulging as though freshly exposited from an active war zone, wig barely clinging to his polliwog hewn skull and stinking to high hell of whiskey and wet cigarette butts.

"What happened?" Beelzebub asked, not particularly caring for the fellow demons drab ensemble but professionally obligated to enquire all the same.

"Don't want to talk about it." Hastur said, staring unblinking into the alley wall as he sucked on a dog end what was long since extinguished.

"The demon Crowley'z dwelling was booby-trapped, I take it."

"No." Hastur swallowed dryly, took the butt away from his lips to dispel smoke what he had not inhaled in the first place and then reinserted the composite free filter. "All clear."

Beelzebub scoffed, hardly surprised. "He really iz a fool. But we knew that already." They leaned closer, taking a whiff of the Duke's habitually mouldy clothes. "Drinking on the job."

"Yes. Of course." Hastur said, pouncing on the approval. He quietly wondered as to whether Lord Beelzebub had picked up any other less commendable scents what had adhered themselves to his physical body, but if they did, they showed rare mercy in not mentioning it. "The meeting?"

"Two of the Vicez showed up." Beelzebub picked at something beneath one of their blackened nails and flicked it away into the shadows cast by the nearby wheelie bins. "The archangel and I will make another attempt tomorrow."

Hastur grunted; a grunt which encompassed so many unforeseen layers of meaning and cast his eyes towards a cloud free, star saturated sky.

"Odd night." He said, somewhat purposelessly.

Beelzebub sniffed in response. Words, they felt, were pointless insofar as expressing what a gross understatement such a sentiment was.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Okay everyone, I'm going to cut to the chase. I WAS planning on posting the next chapter this upcoming Sunday, but I've got to be honest: Right now, I'm just absolutely, bloody wrecked and I have lost the will and the inspiration (at this time) to keep on writing. Long story short; I've crashed.
> 
> I have so many big plans for this story and I do genuinely want to see them through to fruition but right now I'm running on fumes and the writing is becoming more of a chore than something I'm genuinely enjoying. It's actually causing me quite a bit of stress; the amount of pressure I'm putting on myself for something which genuinely started out as enjoyable.
> 
> So, long story short; I'm going to take a little break for a while. I'm not sure how long, but I only want to come back to writing this story, when I feel genuinely excited about doing so. Otherwise, I'm just writing in a hallow, senseless fashion and that's not what I want for a piece I have come to love so much. I've been going at this hard for the past however many months and the last month in particular I haven't taken a night off from editing and writing at all. I just need to take a break for a while and switch off.
> 
> It's disappointing because I was so excited for where I was planning on taking the story in 2020 but right now, I'm just running on empty and you can only write so much for so long without fuel. I need to take some time to get myself excited about this again and that means a proper rest.
> 
> My apologies to those who have been waiting patiently for the following updates. If I get a bit of my vibe back during the week, I might be able to tighten up the next chapter and put it out there, but the next instalments are definitely going to take a while longer. Just to let you all know as well, this is definitely not a 'Holding the chapter hostage' situation, I'm genuinely just fucking exhausted and I need to take some time to get my head screwed on straight.
> 
> I am sorry guys, but with any luck, after some rest, I'm feeling a little bit more positive about things and get some of my mojo back. Hope that you enjoyed the update and that you are all taking care of yourselves. wherever you are in the world :)
> 
> All my love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	55. Or, in which the Virtue's have questionable hobbies.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back, everyone! Damn, did I get some good sleeping under my belt! It's amazing what a good week or so's rest can do for one's motivation! Thank you as always and forever to all of you who have been so amazingly supportive of the story and for bucking me up when I needed it! And of course; thanks especially to those of you who have commented since the last update! It always makes my day to know that I'm not on this crazy train ride alone :)
> 
> Warnings for the follow chapter: Explicit language and some disturbing themes. Not Sandalphon/Hastur disturbing, but a little nose wrinkling nonetheless ;)
> 
> Good Omens-ervation of the day: Anyone else seen those (very much appropriately named) behind the scenes shots of David Tennant in his leather pants? (Fans self) Suffice to say, I am no longer an atheist! Good Lord that is one HELL of a bottom!

* * *

**~X~**

**_~Heaven - Architectural Division~_ **   
**_Some years prior to the Rebellion..._ **

It was very difficult to keep a good sulk going, when a gaggle of Virtue's persisted with arguing less than twenty feet away.

"- perhaps if we attempt to render down the source code. Bring it back to basics and work our way up from there."

"What are we; bloody neophytes?! None of us got to where we are now by revertin' back to 'source codes' when shit gets a bit hairy! Next you'll be suggestin' we break out the finger paint and crayons and soddin' draw picture of what we want!"

"Please, the infighting is getting us nowhere! The moment we start losing our heads is the moment we stop making sense of things. Lashing out at one another is a waste of time none of us can afford!"

"I don't see _you_ comin' up with anything better! If you're going to bother with actin' all enlightened and shit than the least you could do is apply it to the task at hand, rather'n attemptin' to shove a bluebird up our arses!"

"My dear diligence, please do us all a favour and adjust your adrenal levels to a somewhat more amenable level. Because all you're doing right now, is adding to the collective headache what I'm sure we're all doing our best to push to the side."

"Maybe _you're_ all doing your best," Umabel grumbled, dragging himself up from behind the neighbouring panel and glaring at the gathering of Virtues what had assumed custody of the workspace what had once been his own. "I, for one, am finding it harder to ignore by the moment."

They stared back at him; the four of them. Umabel had not known them by name at the time, but he knew what they were and the esteemed position that they enjoyed in palatial proximity to the Almighty. He ought to have offered far the more an appropriate cadence of reverence and respect, but he was a tired, heart weary creature those days and even an angel had its limits.

Since the dismantling of his beloved pet project, Umabel found himself spending much of his time wallowing in self-pity like a quiescent hog in a mud bath. It was far the more simple to do so, given the strange and malicious illness what had sought to inter itself amongst the angelic populace. It had made its mark upon the architects and artisans in particular; to the almost pious exclusion of the military personnel. This meant that the once busy and bustling creationist division was left for the most part disconcertingly, and rather the more usefully, unattended.

The astronomy floor had been entirely vacant when Umabel had made his way there to mope. He had been satisfactorily invested in perhaps the second hour of his maudlin vigil when the Virtue's had ingratiated themselves upon his now abandoned workspace, and set to work compiling some inordinately complex code which they spent rather the more time arguing about than amending.

The arguing had been enough. It had been further exacerbated by the punitive bleats of the construction panel whenever the Virtue's had run a simulation which had proved unsuccessful. They had done it so often over the past two hours that it had set Umabel to grinding his celestial teeth down to the nubs. It would hardly have surprised him to have found white splinters wended throughout the insides of his cheeks later on, given the tenacity in which he had taken to gnashing them together.

Cherubim's were not given over to many moments, if any, of edacious self-pity. When they did, was it too much to ask that they could do so in relative peace and quiet?

"How long have you been hidin' there?" Asked the tallest of the gathering. Female in appearance, with a long braid the colour of flaxen wheat, with sleeves rolled up over heavily muscled arms, they were quite clearly not one with whom trifling would have been at all recommended. It was she who had been doing most of the yelling and she what currently wore the look of one who might have snapped a steel rod between their teeth if the foolish thing thought it a wise idea to inter itself there.

"Not been hiding. Moping maybe; not hiding." Umabel slid his back down the adjacent work panel and stared at what had once been the holding pen for his centuries old passion project. He worked his lower lip between his teeth; doing his utmost to keep those ostensibly un-angelic feelings from burbling up inside of him and making themselves known.

The Virtue with the kindly face and the impressively full moustache, took note of where the Cherubim's gaze had drifted and interpreted, somewhat correctly, the emotion what sang out from the angels aggrieved expression.

"Oh, I am sorry. We were under the impression that this space wasn't being utilized."

"It's not," Umabel sniffed, waving his hand in a careless manner. It was far from an accurate indicator as to what it was that he was feeling inside, but discretion had always been the better part of valour. And angels were nothing if not virtuous. "Go for broke."

The Virtue peered at him curiously, turning ever so temperately upon his heel so as to drift closer. Umabel felt a warm, comforting sensation steal through him and it made him want to weep once more. If there was but a tear left in him to put to good use.

"Is something the matter, small one?"

"Humanitas, please don't start." Sighed the Virtue with the thick braid and the particularly careworn expression.

"I was only-"

"I know what you were 'only' and I don't mean ta be insensitive, but the angel really can't be here. This is..." She lowered her voice, though it made little difference so far as blocking Umabel out was concerned. "-sort of classified, innit?"

"Perhaps same magnanimity would not go astray, Industria," So urged the Virtue with the dark black hair and the warm, upturned eyes. A similar wave of empathy and kindness filtered out from him in turn and the compacting of all that venerate good feeling was near crippling. "Can you not see how the poor thing is hurting?"

"I'm not trying to be a bitch, Humilitas, but we really don't have time to be palaverin' to the feelings of some random cherubim!" Industria somewhat desperately appealed. She did look flustered, Umabel thought. Small fly-away's had escaped from her otherwise intricate braid and her wide eyes had taken on a particularly haunted look.

"This project is going to take years to complete, my dear heart." The one called Humanitas said, holding up his hand as a gentle means of placation. "We can spare a moment."

Industria sighed and rolled her eyes, but conceded to their designs by drifting back up into the workspace and taking a closer look at the formula what was on display there. The three remaining Virtues billowed closer to the mournful Cherubim, wearing each the same sort of glib smile as a camp counsellor on the verge of busting out Kumbaya unironically and likely unappreciatively, on the ukulele.

"What has happened to see you in such a saddened state, little one?" Humanitas asked softly, kneeling down so as to meet Umabel's eyes.

The cherubim was silent at first, but the intrinsic draw of the Virtue of kindness was a tide what was almost impossible to resist. Indeed, it seemed to pull at him more the strongly by the moment, until the definitive second in which he felt as though he could no longer resist its resolute vacuum.

"This was my workspace..." He said, gesturing to the magically encircled area in which Industria was currently suspended. "The military dismantled it. Hundreds of years of work - gone... In the blink of an eye. Poof."

One of the Virtue's; whose tangled beard was nearly quite so long as his equally tangled hair, placed a hand against his breast, his mouth turned down in the corners so that they steeped into the valley of his facial hair like a glacier sinking into a weed tangled sea.

"Oh, my heart. You poor little thing; how awful!"

"Now I feel like a proper shitheel..." Humilitas murmured, and it was quite obvious that he meant it. "We shouldn't be using it... Why would the military suggest...?"

"You might as well." Umabel shrugged. He picked at his fingernails; always sensibly short and grime free. He picked at them, nonetheless, for it was something with which to occupy himself in a time in which there was nothing in the way of a decent drink in which to drown one's sorrows. "No sense in letting it go to waste. It would be pleased, I think, to be of use to someone again."

"Dearest creature, you are so courageous in your pain. And how callous of your brethren; to discount your feelings in this," Humilitas said, his eyes creasing as though they themselves perceived the weight of the cherubim's suffering. With a sigh, he directed his gaze towards Humanitas. "Were you aware of this, brother?"

"Well, of course not. Do you suppose me capable of abiding such an insult?" Humanitas said, stroking his fingers down through the gallows of his moustache in a manner which left little doubt as to just how uncomfortable he felt about the whole thing.

"This is so dosh darn wrong...'Scuse my language." Murmured the one with the beard. He tilted his head back; hands on hips and liquidated a deep, wobbly sounding sigh towards the distant marble girders of the ceiling. "Oh, great. Here come the tears. I knew it."

"Suppose you've given away your 'kerchief, as per the norm, Caritas." Humanitas chuckled, reaching into his sleeve and disinterring an embroidered handkerchief that he lazily tossed in his fellow Virtue's direction.

"If crying were a means of fixing it, everything would be back to normal by now," The cherubim said, with no small trace of mirth. "I've shed enough waterworks to flood the oceans of the new world."

He thought the words perhaps a little melodramatic and would not have been the least surprised if the Virtue's had seen fit to pull him up on it. They were the direct affiliates of the Almighty, and it was not considered at all appropriate for an angel to be indulging their lesser moods such as he had taken to doing these past few days. Even Raphael, who was as patient and as kindly an overseer as any, had been forced to take Umabel aside and demand that he pull his head together. His inability to transgress the disappointment of his projects closure was having a pay it forward impact on the morale of the other architects; which was an infection every bit as dangerous as the metaphysical sickness what was currently winding its way through the angelic populace.

But the Virtue's surprised him and did not in fact make any of the demands he would have considered appropriate and, more to the point, deserved. Instead, they continued to look to him with acceptance, kindness and empathy. As though the cherubim's insistence on steeping himself in the wretched waters of self-indulgent maudlinism was not only reasonable, but every bit as expected as the marching footfall of times' passage itself.

"Listen..." Caritas said, having finished with the mopping of his eyes and moving now to kneel at Umabel's side. "I know it's not much, little one but..." He reached into the pocket of his robes and took from within a small, round sweet that was wrapped in what appeared to be a gold leaf. "It's my last one. I was planning on eating it whilst we were working but..." He smiled kindly as he peeled apart the delicate halves of the leaf and held it out towards Umabel. "I think you need it more than I do."

"Caritas... you would give someone the inside lining of your pockets if you were able." Humilitas said approvingly. It was obviously an expected and natural thing where the Virtue of charity was concerned, because he did not bother to affect modesty nor pleasure in response to the praise.

"If they had need of them, yeah. 'Course." He gestured again with the sweet, his freckled features taking on the slightest hint of what might have been considered anxious urgency. As though it would cause him physical pain if the cherubim did not accept his generosity. "Go on. Take it."

Umabel never had much of a taste for sweet things. What was understood as 'sweet' in Heaven in those days, was a far duller experience than what might one day be experienced on earth. Human's were simply far the more creative than the likes of anal retentive angel's could ever be.

But an act of kindness should never be denied and so the cherubim carefully plucked the bright red sweet off of the gold leaf and held it between his fingers. It's acrylic shell had an ever so slightly sticky texture and it gleamed as though its surface were every bit as reflective as the sea whence catching the light of the full moon.

"Thank you." He said, genuinely grateful for the Virtue’s generosity. He placed the sweet between his teeth and allowed it to settle upon his tongue. He was surprised to find its flavour far the more intense than what he had been expecting. Similar to the fruits what were grown by the Gardeners, yet denser somehow... as though it had been touched by something of which Heaven had never before had at his disposal.

"Seems like the confectioners are getting cleverer by the day," He murmured, slipping the round bauble into his left cheek and releasing more of the sweet flavour in another hard suck. "Maybe I should just pack up and go work with them. Least the military leaves them well enough alone..."

"I must confess; they do marvellous work over there." Humanitas beamed so that his thick moustache appeared somehow all the bushier in the throes of his gently nurtured pleasure. "Those pink mallow things they work on are particularly divine."

"My commiserations for having nothing of a more substantial nature to offer," Humilitas said, smiling as he turned both hands over and offered his palms towards the ceiling. "But if I know you cherubim's, I know that you do enjoy a cuddle every once in a while."

Cherubim's were indeed one of the few angels what genuinely thrived on physical contact. Usually, they were well suited to meet one another's loving needs and Cupid was, in particular, more than amenable to embrace whoever or whatever it was he felt might have been in need of his tender affections.

Umabel had been shirking contact a great deal lately, for it simply suited him more to remain entrenched in his poor mood for as long as possible. He was not even certain himself as to why he persisted with being so stubborn, but the offer of a hug from a being what was quite literally radiating warmth and positivity from every pore of his Celestial body broke through the last remaining vestige of the cherubim's resolve with such impunity that the angel felt his soul verily ache with need.

"Yeah. Yeah we do." He said, eyes tearing over as, with a small chuckle at his own folly, he permitted Humilitas to put his arms about his shoulders. He pushed himself into the Virtue's embrace; felt the flow of compassion and unconditional positive regard drift on into his spirit and set to work stoppering up the belligerent cracks what had wended themselves through his celestial condition. "Oh, I do apologize," He said, for he felt more ashamed by the moment. "I should be over this by now."

"No apologies." Humanitas said, petting the back of the cherubim's hand in a friendly manner. "We must all grieve our tragedies; no matter how great nor how seemingly small. Deny yourself that, and it feeds the shadow what lingers within our souls. And forms an ulcer in your gut for good measure." He added, laughing as he rubbed his palm against the charitable rise of his belly.

"Hate to break up the love fest, fella's but we really ought to be cracking on." Industria said, floating by in the background, upside down, arms crossed and braid trailing behind her as though it were water she was easing herself through, rather than the thin of the air. "We're losin' Heaven light."

"I should be going." Umabel said, slightly muffled on account of the sweet as he struggled to ease himself out of Humilitas's warm embrace and off of the cold marble floor in the same gesture.

"Not on our account, I hope."

"Humanitas-" Industria called, warningly.

"Have a care, dear Diligence." Caritas murmured. His voice was kind, but there was something nonetheless firm about his tone. "It's hardly as though the cherubim-" He paused, eyes flinching shut a moment as though wincing at the pain of someone driving a needle into the tip of his finger. "- I'm sorry; what was your name?"

"Umabel." The angel, what was to become the demon Crowley, replied.

"Umabel. Right." Caritas called back up to Industria's less than impressed expression. "It's not as though Umabel here is likely to make heads or tails of what it is that we are doing. What harm is there in letting him stay?"

"It's better off that he wait until he finishes eating, anyhow." Humilitas added, gesturing to the cherubim's round cheek, what was currently making short, chipmunky work of the sweet. "What if when he's walking he stumbles and the lolly lodges itself in his throat? He might choke to death in the halls!"

Humanitas's eyes widened in genuine alarm at the thought. "Oh, yes. We mustn't have that."

"Fiiiine." Industria groaned, realizing that she was clearly on the end of a losing battle. "Just don't come crying to me when the others start tearin' strips off of you's for passively breakin' the rules."

Humilitas tutted as he made his way back to the control panel. "Please. I'm well past the point of concerning myself with Superbia's moods, Humanitas will simply charm Invidia around to his side and who could possibly raise their voice at Caritas? It would be like yelling at one of those... bunny rabbit things the ornithology team are working on."

"They are sweet, aren't they?" Caritas effused, scrunching his nose as he bypassed Humilitas and elevated himself through the protective layer of the workspace.

Humanitas smiled, taking Umabel's hands between his own and giving them a comforting squeeze. "Stay as long as you like, dear fellow."

Umabel might ordinarily have considered it the proper thing to have left. The Virtue's work was, such as it had always been, the most important work what Heaven would ever play host to and it would not do to get in the way of that. A good tongue lashing would be the least of his concerns.

But he was a curious creature; in spite of such things being discouraged and he could not, in good faith, resist in the opportunity to get a first hand perspective of just how these mysterious creatures conducted their ever the more mysterious duties.

For his part; the entire thing was much more boring than he could have ever imagined. He supposed that the Virtue's were much cleverer and more practiced at their art than any of the architects; but they weren't especially creative. Umabel did not entirely understand what it was they were working on, but he understood a great deal more than the Virtue's obviously thought him capable.

They were working on a code; that much was obvious. What the code pertained to was anyone's guess, but it did not take too long for the cherubim to figure out that it was a code that was intended to rewrite a core operating thematic. The reason as to why the formula was so complex, was that the Virtue's were displaying both the original code they were intending to subvert and the code what they would introduce so as to initiate the subversion.

Umabel sucked on his sweet as he observed the Virtue's continued attempts to attack, integrate and then rewrite the original code. They only ever got so far as partial ingratiation before the formula was rejected. They appeared to be approaching the task in a frustratingly standardized 'by the book' method, which made an artisan like Umabel want to tear his own hair out in sympathy.

It was clear that they were brilliant; perhaps even more so than Raphael. Most of what they were doing Umabel could barely make heads nor tails of. Where they fell short, was their complete and utter lack of inventiveness. The reluctance to attempt something outlandish, to take chances, to incorporate something (God forbid) crazy, and see whether it did in fact pay off.

The Virtue's persisted with their attempts for many admirable, nail gnawing hours. Umabel, intrigued, curious and with nothing better to do, worked his sweet down into nothingness and continued to quietly and subtly observe their efforts. Understanding little by little more of what it was they were attempting to do, the more he examined the inexorably complex weavings of their byzantine sums.

Eventually, and with patently heavy hearts, the Virtue's conceded defeat for the day and drifted down out of the protective bauble until their bare feet touched to the white marble floor.

"If I'm not back soon, Invidia will come looking." Humanitas explained, scrawling his finger about on the panel of the workstation so that their hours of efforts were collectively saved into the devices memory. "You know how she gets."

"Superbia likely hasn't even observed my absence." Humilitas contributed, with but the slightest desolate twist of his lips. Industria gave him a hard thump to the shoulder which was likely intended to be supportive, but almost succeeded in driving her fellow Virtue two yards deep into Heaven's floor.

"Got a hard time showin' it, that one. He care's in his own way." She gave an officious grin before swinging a heavy looking grey carry bag onto her broad shoulders and striding towards the door. The others lingered a while longer; Humilitas turning and bowing at Umabel, thanking him for his grace and his kindness before he too followed in Industria's wake.

Caritas wished him all the luck in his future endeavours and then attempted to hand over his robe; just in case the Cherubim were to catch a chill what would have been the very first of its kind to grace Heaven. Umabel managed to put him off, though it did in fact take far the more convincing than the Cherubim believed strictly necessary.

Humanitas was the last to depart and he too offered Umabel his condolences. He informed the Cherubim that he was more than welcome to come and speak to him if he ever wished for a kind ear into which to air his grievances. He made his way then, and turned off the majority of the overarching lights of the workspace, leaving only those that overlooked the sector in in which Umabel continued to reside.

The cherubim had sat idle for many hours but his brain had been racing at a speed what would have put an Olympic sprinter to shame.

His curiosity paved the way. He eased what might have been, in the mortal condition, a cramped body up out of the lean into which he had set it for the better part of so many hours and approached the work panel what had for centuries belonged to him.

He took note of the fingerprints what had made their home amidst those he had himself near fossilized into the surface and cast his hand across the screen. The workings of the Virtue's were cast into the air high above his head; the laborious and painstaking efforts of ineffable and transcendent creatures lain bear for the ignorant eyes of but a lowly angel to gaze upon.

He had never felt so comforted.

For this was surely the penultimate of intellectual ponderings. An equation and a query that beings what were considered to be the near equals of the Lord God Herself struggled to comprehend and divine.

And Umabel could see how the dissonant threads might come together.

He could make sense of it.

Sense where they had perceived only chaos.

Umabel was a clever creature. He was a grieving creature. And worst of all still; he was a bored creature. And cleverness and boredom are two things what should never, in good conscience, be left unattended.

The first of the pavers what formed the vague path downwards fell that day. Upon that paver, the cherubim what was to become Crowley, placed a metaphorical foot.

Umabel opened the program and drifted into the heart of the Virtue's labyrinthine equations.

And got to work.

* * *

_**~Saturday - 27th of April, 2019: 2:38 am~** _   
_**Theresa's Hall - Belgravia, London...** _

_**Nine months to the apex...** _

With a net worth estimate of approximately thirty-five million pounds (give or take a sovereign or two), Theresa's Hall was hardly what you might refer to as a modest dwelling.

Located in a prime-ish north-eastern facing position on a particular street in Belgravia London, the opulent mansion dwelling was commissioned in the late 1800's by lesser renowned architect Onslow H. Parfitt.

This output of creative energy came about as a direct and incontestably competitive response to another mansion what had been built in collaboration between two of his considered to be 'close friends', who had gone out drinking one night without him and scrawled out their eponymous design on a piece of paper one of them had dredged out from the depths of the very carry bag Onslow had gifted him his most recent birthday.

They had not, of course, gone to the trouble of inviting Onslow to join them on their ambitious project and so, with the understandably histrionic response which would, in later centuries, be perfected by the likes of Mariah Carey, the grand old architect flipped his prodigious middle finger into the wind and set out with the specific purpose of designing a far more opulent Grade II residence than those pair of shysters could ever so much as _dream_ of doing.

The end result, much as you can imagine, echoed for centuries past of ever the more trenchant bellows of snubbed desperation.

Theresa's Hall (named for Onslow H. Parfitt's beloved pet parakeet) was not so much a slap in the face of his once dear friends efforts, but a double fisted clothesliner bedecked with the likes of garish, stone encrusted rings what would render the receiving face into a state what would serve as little use other than to strain noodles through.

The mansion was sprawling and, much like the parakeet for which it had been named, loud, annoying and colourful. Rather than entrance, the building possessed a somewhat angry, officious energy; as though it were a boxer on the perpetual edge of entering the ring, smack talking whichever opponent might have dared enter their weight division.

It was a house what would as soon as kick the legs out from underneath you, so much as look at you, and it took nothing in the way of prisoners. This was a house what hated every other house what had ever been built and if it could spit, it would be constantly raining down bitter phlegm filled resentment onto every fiscus filled terrace within reach.

At a little over eight thousand, three hundred and seventy five square feet, it had all the necessary makings what were required so as to slot it into the realm of 'mega mansion'.

It had twelve bedrooms, nine bathrooms all fitted with bidets, an industrial sized kitchen what would have sent even the most acclaimed of professional chefs to creaming their checkered trousers, a double garage and an elevator; which one could not argue was the absolute pinnacle of refinery.

It was a judicious cornucopia of classical architecture, predisposed by the not so typical embellishments of gold and black what brazenly dominated the cornices of every room. Not a single ceiling could be found what did not have a chandelier affixed to it; overladen with pointlessly garish pendalogues of a circumference what seceded that of a lighthouse bulb. There were an inordinate number of towering bay windows, each draped in elaborate gold curtains what were cinched about the middle with double-tasselled black tie backs such that they very much resembled an uneducated fetishists approximation of a Japanese geisha.

It was a domicile what was entirely unsuited as to its purpose; that of housing the inexcusably slovenly Vice Acedia.

The mansion did in fact belong to their counterpart, Industria, who had bought it at a steal from Superbia. The Capital Vice of Pride had purchased the property on a whim in 1985 and quickly turned his nose up at it; having discovered that there was little of which to be proud of in this architectural equivalent of chintzy potpourri.

They had let it go for, in what could be considered among ancient creatures such as themselves, a whistle and a song; preferring to wash his hands of the passive aggressive double glazed monstrosity and be done with it.

Industria had little care as to the outward presentation of a property. It was the service of which it provided that she was far the more interested in. And as the Virtue of diligence, serviceable means were by far the more compelling factor than how something polished up. Clean fingernails and soft hands might send the world to crooning, but they had likely never done a hard days work, and were about as useful to her as a screen door on a submarine.

The mansion would serve its purpose. It currently stood as the largest owned property in London what belonged to any one member of the Contingency team and was fated as such, to serve as their base of operations for the short-term foreseeable future. The spatial rooms and generous basement annex what comprised the imperious foundations of Theresa's Hall was well suited for their needs.

* * *

Industria arrived at Theresa's Hall at two-thirty-eight am. She had rented a van at Heathrow airport and driven herself the quiet hour or so into Belgravia, veering slightly off track to purchase six al pastor pork quesadilla's and eighteen deep fried oysters from _Taquería's_ in Westbourne Grove.

It had been a long flight and they were a big eater. Airline meals were not nearly enough to satiate the appetite of a creature what required quite as much energy as they did.

She parked in the double door garage, having opened it with her copy of the master keys and proceeded to offload the two modestly sized bags she had brought with her. Each did in fact weigh a great deal more than they appeared, but Industria was no slouch. She pitched the luggage around her shoulders as though they posed as little resistance as a calcium deficient toddler and slammed the sliding door of the van shut with her ring finger; just about shattering the passenger side window as a result.

It required but one look at her to understand why. Industria was tall; approximately six feet seven inches of tall and impressively girthy, to boot. She might have had a shot as a heavyweight in the WWE. Her musculature was just enough so as to make most humans stop and take a second look, but not so much as to delineate their chin into the waiting wall of their chests.

Her skin was bronze, her hair platinum blonde and braided, and she was dressed like a mechanic from an old seventies sitcom. She even had a piece of some indeterminable something pinched between her immaculate teeth; what she twiddled from side to side during conversation and what served to muffle her voice on occasion.

She was met in the grand entryway by Samson the Butler. She very much liked Samson, and felt something what might be akin to human reluctance in knowing that she would very soon be forced to dispense with him. It simply wouldn't do to have too many humans underfoot, given all the particularly inhuman like goings on that were about to occur within Theresa's Hall.

"Lady Industria," He said, in that very clipped and very appropriate English manner that the Virtue ever so much enjoyed hearing. "So nice to see you again."

"Samson, me old china, you look positively boffin!" Industria locked the aging butler into the sort of hug which was somewhat ill advised given the mans recent descent in rheumatism and smiled approvingly at the milling of servants what lined up like dutiful soldiers. "Workin' hard as usual, I see."

"You expect nothing less, I'm sure."

"You assume correctly. No, no. No." Industria smiled, holding up a cautionary finger at one of the footman; who was attempting to relieve her of her bags. "I think I had best keep a hold of this one, flower. It's a wee bit on the heavy side."

"How was your flight?" Samson enquired, trying to sponge a spot of axel grease off of the lapel of his suit as he lead Industria down the hall. How a woman of such great wealth and esteem abided the getting around in clothes what were constantly besieged in oil, never ceased to astonish.

"Bumpy over the mountains, turbulent over the sea. Nothing out of the use." It was always difficult, handing over control to the likes of humans when it came to matters of work. Industria was enormously self-sufficient and as such suffered horrendous bouts of guilt when she was otherwise forced into relying on others to perform services on her account. Flying a plane was something she had simply not gotten around to learning yet and so she'd had no choice but to abide the slight; fingernails near about tearing the stuffing out of her armrests the entire flight.

She cocked her head towards the stairs, sharing a commiserating look with Samson. He looked very much on the verge of the perpetual sigh what accompanied any mention of his begrudged and equally grubby charge.

"So... how have they been?"

"Much the same as ever." Samson said. His upper lip gave a subtle twitch what was ever the more telling as to his true and considerably less professionally inclined feelings on the matter.

"Incorrigible then?" Industria asked, knowingly. The butler permitted himself a small, assuaging titter.

"They cause us very little trouble, my lady. Though if I may speak openly," He leaned close, lowering his voice as though the cavernous breadth and depth of the house was not enough on its own to ostensibly swallow his consternations. "It would please us more should they see fit to bathe every once in a while."

Industria sighed and wrinkled her nose. "Oh, the little monster. I shall have to have words, I see." She hefted one of the bags higher upon her shoulder and made her way towards the stairs. "Where might I find the filthy little fiend?"

"The same place you always find them, I daresay." Samson said, somewhat amused by his lady's appraisal. One whom marched about in grease stained clothing was hardly in fine form as to be casting stones, you might say. "Have you eaten?"

"Picked up some grub on the way. Please don't go to any trouble." She laughed as she bound her way up the stairs, carrying the equivalent of a rhino carcass upon her back as she went. "I daresay my better half gives you more than enough as it is!"

"Very good," The Butler said, and then drifted off to do whatever it was that butlers did. To shine the cutlery, plump the pillows, run a gloved fingertip upon a polished brash handle and hike his patrician nostrils at the smallest smudge what dared adhere itself to the fabric. In a house as ostentatious as Theresa's Hall, there was always some manner of something what required doing. And being portentously snobby in the executing of.

Industria lugged her bags up the stairs and took them on a scenic tour down the left hand hallway of the upper terrace. She made her way to a particular doorway, indistinguishable from any of the other doorways what bordered it, if not for the flashing lights petering out beneath the jam and the distant sounds of machine gun fire coming from somewhere inside. She raised one enormous fist and slammed it against the wood panels; almost breaking the door down in the process.

"...yah?" Came a distracted, uncaring drawl in return. Industria smiled and pushed her way inside.

There was Acedia, much as was to be expected, perched in front of a huge television and playing what looked like some sort of multiplayer online war game. They didn't so much as glance up at the intrusion; more the likely assuming it to have been one of the help, there to refresh their snack bowl or bring them another can of fizzy cordial.

"Well, don't bother to get up or anythin'." Industria chuckled, closing the door behind her. Acedia sighed and pushed the microphone of the headset they were wearing, closer to their Cheeto stained mouth.

"afk." They paused the game, pushing the headphones back so that they caught the hood of their jacket and peeled it away from their greasy head of hair. They turned so as to stare torpidly up at Industria; orange stained lips set in a rarely affected pinch of annoyance. Annoyance what rapidly tempered into something marginally softer, when they realized just who it was that had interrupted their session. "oh. ...it's you."

Industria giggled deliriously, all that barely compartmentalized energy spilling out from her like a teenaged girl on their first date. She danced on the spot, extending her arms as though fully expecting the somnolent Vice to propel themselves into her bone breaking grip.

"Surprise! Happy end of the world!"

"...not happy." Acedia grunted, unwinding the cord of their headset from around their shoulders and dumping it on the ground. "sucks. sucks the big one. hard." They took a sip from their Dr Pepper, dipping the can towards Industria's unperturbed expression. "know why you're happy... gonna be a lot of hard work..."

"Is it _ever!"_ Industria exclaimed. "It's like all me Christmas's have come at once." She waggled her fingers in what the Vice supposed was intended to be an enticing manner. "Come on then. Drag yer grubby little arse up and give us a hug!"

"i'm not getting up... you come over here."

"... Seriously...?" Industria said, some of the wind having been forcibly leached from her sails. It was the affectation what was intended by their secondary half, so as to provide balance, yet the diminishing of her natural high never failed to bum her out. "It's been like... ten years, love. Haven't seen each other since the last get together. Least ye can do is pretend like yer happy to see me."

"i am happy to see you." Acedia said, surprised that this wasn't obvious. "can't you tell from my expressive body language and the loving timbre of my voice that i am literally burbling with excitement and barely repressed glee?"

"Oh, you are the worst. Even Superbia tries harder than you." Industria nonetheless smiled fondly as she marched over, knelt at Acedia's side and pulled them into a hug what paid special mind to the delicate state of the Vice's body. Acedia responded by wrapping one of their arms about Industria's broad shoulders, hand hidden by the trailing length of their grimy sleeve. It was an extraordinary level of affection for a Vice what had precious little output at their disposal.

"Oh, I've missed you, ya rotten old thing." Industria leaned back, sighed and took a mostly clean rag from the pocket of her overalls. She pinched Acedia's chin between her fingers, holding it steady whilst she wiped the mess from the Vice's reluctantly pursed lips. "You do know the food is supposed to go _in_ ya mouth, right?"

"that's the end game, but one can't be expected to hit that bullseye every time..."

"You're terrible," Industria tucked the rag away and leaned in so as to impart a kiss to Acedia's mouth. She sniffed. "God damn, you fucking reek."

"and here we go..." Acedia said, having expected nothing less.

"Samson said you haven't been bathing again. What's up with that, treasure?"

"...got a lot on my plate." They took another sip from their drink and then tossed the can aside. It added itself to the rapidly expanding pile of its slain brethren, what aspired to at some point in the future, prohibit anyone from being able to actually enter the room. "world ending, case you hadn't heard..."

"'Ay. Don't shit in my coffee tin and tell me it's culture, love." Industria said. They knew their counterpart far the better than that. "I'd wager you've barely gotten off of your smelly arse since you touched down in London."

"saw Patientia." Acedia mentioned, having been reminded by the reference to the airport. Industria sighed empathetically as she made her way into the ensuite; switching on the light and dropping the plug into the base of the spectacular claw footed bath tub what was installed therein.

"Oh, the poor old dear," She murmured, perching on the border of the tub and switching on the faucets. She dashed her hand beneath the tap, to ensure that the temperature would be optimally balanced. "How are they travelling?"

"not great." Acedia tossed another cheesy puff into their mouth and paused a moment so as to suck the outer coating off. "scared. ...super scared. think most everyone is. even superbia. not that the proud bastard would ever say it out loud..."

"Kind of the nature of the beast." Industria hesitated a moment. She hated bringing it up. Knew better of course, but it always felt as though the reference was enough to invite the reality. "He's already... back, innin' he? Here on earth, I mean."

Acedia softened a little. They were the more sensible of the two and they felt very much responsible for assuaging their counterparts fears. Not to suggest that they would go so far as to lie, but enough so as to make them feel a little guilty for not having anything more the palatable to offer than the truth.

"...somewhere. don't know where, 'xactly. Patientia can't seem to get a good bead on him. seems to be moving about a lot."

"Well, he wouldn't know where he was going really, would he? Never seen the earth before." Industria took from the wall cabinet an unopened bottle of bath oil, snapped it open and poured almost half the contents into the tub. "Shame he couldn't have just... smashed into the side of the fuckin' moon..."

Acedia gave a low whistle; quietly impressed by the Virtue's shameless indulgence. "that's a bit of a cunty thing to say..."

"After what the bastard put Patientia through? The way that his poison leached through Heaven? It would have been a mercy. Least of all where he's concerned." Industria went to turn off the tap, forgetting in her bad mood to temper her strength and snapping the gold handle clean off the wall entirely. "Oh, fuck-knuckle!"

"he can't help what he is. any the more than we can..." Acedia murmured, clicking out of their game and shutting the system down. There was no way they were getting back online tonight. Not with Industria buzzing around them like a bumble bee with a live wire wended into its' central nervous system.

"We cannot help what we are, true. But we can chose as to how to behave. He never bothered." Industria repaired the plumbing with a snap of her fingers, clearing away the water what had jettisoned free in the same gesture and set down a bath mat. She moved so as to position herself in the doorway and snapped her fingers again; the gesture intended only so as to attract the Vice's attention. "Come on. Up."

"i don't need a bath..." Acedia groaned. They knew that there was little point in protesting against the likes of Diligence, but a bath was just a pain in the arse. All the scrubbing and soaping and seeping... and then the towelling off, ugh.

"My bum ye 'don't need a bath'! Astronauts in the international space station can smell you. And you need-" Industria stomped over, taking the game controller out of Acedia's hands and setting it down alongside the console. "-to be taking care of your sores. Never know when we might have need of them."

"the sores are fine. just as... open and oozy as ever." Acedia glumly extended their arm. A locust came scuttling out from beneath the awning of their too long sleeve; setting up camp in the palm of their hand. "see?"

Industria's face creased into sympathetic lines. "I don't know how you can sleep. Just the idea of... all those..." She shuddered. "Urk... crawling around under your skin all the time."

"i don't sleep. and I drown it out. with whatever the distraction that takes me." Acedia crushed the locust in their hand, ground their fingers about a moment before uncurling them. A pile of ash was all that remained of the insect and they sent it on its way with a small puff of air from their lips. "not like i've got a choice. am what i am."

"Well, _I'm_ here now." Industria said, pressing a kiss into Acedia's pale, sun deflecting cheek. "And I've got a thousand different distractions what will help take your mind off of it."

"sounds like a lot of work." Acedia grouched, with a nonetheless tolerant smile.

"The good things always are." Industria said, reaching down to hook her arms up underneath the Vices minute body. She carried them into the bathroom, taking it upon themselves to get them undressed (for they were lesser the likely to do so themselves) before then submerging their stinking, filthy body into the floral scented bathwater. She made good and certain to prop the lazy creature's head up with a bath pillow, for they were just differential enough so as to not fight back should they slip underneath the surface of the water and bundled their dirty clothes up under her arm.

"I'm just going to run these down to the laundry room."

"...servants for that..."

"I know." Industria scrunched her nose meaningfully. "Wanted to check in on my little friend. They still keeping their eyes on you?"

"of a night-time." Acedia blew a shallow breath into a hill of bubbles what drifted up close by to their chin. The small white cloud fractured into tiny white shards, what drifted lazily downwards so as to retain their grip upon the surface of the water. "can't get round during the day... obviously. does its checks in the dark." They squirmed a little. "wish it'd learn not to make so much noise. you'd think after eighty years it'd just... give up on griping."

"Six thousand years didn't slow you down any." Industria teased, dropping a kiss to the crown of Acedia's still very much grimy and oil greased head. "I'll whip my way back shortly. Be a love and try and not drown in the meantime, eh?"

Acedia offered a grunt which might have served as something of a confirmation. Industria battened down the urge to turn about and forcefully weld the back of their neck to the bath cushion but reasoned that if they hadn't yet killed themselves in the time they had spent apart, it wasn't likely to happen in the next half hour or so. Though you never quite knew with one as differential as Acedia. A being what was so formatively lazy that they wouldn't at all be bothered with walking away from a ticking box of C4 if it was dropped down beside them. It would have been far too much effort to so much as pause and save their game, let alone drag their somnolent arse off of the floor and move to a distance in which burning shrapnel was less likely to frisbee itself into their femoral artery.

Hence why Industria had been required to go to quite as much effort as they had in protecting them.

They couldn't be expected to be there all the time, after all. The world was in need of the perpetual presence of hard work.

Who then, could be expected to watch over Acedia with as much attention to detail and invested interested as Industria?

No one of earth, that was for certain. Humans were a useful band aid solution, but they were fallible and they could hardly be expected to stand up against the might of any occult forces what might come knocking.

Industria needed something far the more reliable than that. Something stronger. Something... adaptable.

They took from one of their two carry bags a small innocuous looking rubber mallet. Mjolnir had taken many guises during its thousands of years spent in the service of Industria; a Virtue who had once, in their time, been referred to as the God of Thunder Thor.

Back in those days, Mjolnir had been quite a sight. Intricately detailed, with a heft approximate to that of a foetal rhinoceros and capable of crushing a mortals head with as little resistance as an overripe tomato presents to a harried mother who is attempting to gauge appropriate fruit ripeness whilst her four squealing overtired tykes plead for any number of confectionary goods what thoughtlessly promenade their baby teeth rotting wares to either side of the checkout. Why such goods were placed within easy grabbing distance of merciless three year old's sticky fingers is no difficult thing to ascertain really, and says quite a bit about the cunning nature of how marketing managers make the most of exhausted mothers surrendering to their offspring's insistent and tenacious foot stampings and rotisserie floor scrubbing tantrums, but one finds themselves deferring, as is per the standard.

Mjolnir, much like their master, preferred to keep with the times. And, in so keeping with the times, found that presenting itself as an impressive, ornate and grandiose relic of ancient days long since relegated to the trash heap of history, was a fast means of drawing far too much attention. Most specifically that of beady eyed antiquarian purveyors and museum registrar's.

Mjolnir could still cleave a mans skull like a poorly set trifle with barely a flick of Industria's inappropriately thick wrist. But their appearance did not seek to lend itself to this reality in any way, shape or form. Mjolnir, in contrast to its girthy historical reputation, appeared as nothing more than a simple, economy brand rubber mallet; discount price tag still attached to the bored hole in it's grip. (It apparently retailed for seven pounds and thirty-five cents.)

The form suited the needs. What power was interred within Mjolnir remained much the same as it ever was. But who would ever seek to steal such a thing? The mallet not only appeared substandard and unassuming in every regard, but a good deal of the rubber had worn away and the handle was chipped. It radiated worthlessness with the same potency of a male weasel voraciously diffusing his musk into the air during weasel mating season. Most anyone who, in somehow stumbling across Mjolnir, would experience a deep, pervasive urge to ignore the thing; for it could hardly be worth the effort what would be required in stealing it.

Mjolnir had been at Industria's side since the very beginning. It had served her faithfully. Its deep, cavernous blows had shaken the very foundations of the earth. Shuddered apart tectonic plates, causing volcano's to belch cacophonous smoke and boiling magma. It had brought down lightening, shuddered mountain ranges into existence and splintered apart particularly obstinate walnuts when the craving had so taken the eternally hungry Virtue.

She held it not as you might expect the legendary weapon was deserving of, but spun it about by the braided cord what was threaded through the hole in the handle, whistling as the mallet circled her hand. She caught it easily in her palm as she stepped out of Acedia's bedroom, closing the door behind her and proceeded to make her way back down the stairs and into the elevator itself.

Whistling still, Industria jabbed one of the buttons and the elevator grumbled into motion, descending with the urgency of an old age pensioner with a wonky walker towards a traffic warden, into the bowels of Theresa's Hall.

This was of course no secret hideout of super villain specific acumen. The basement annex had always been part of the original plans. It was where all the laundry was done and where some of the staff might have come to steal a nap where they figured they might have a chance of getting away with it. It was fortunate that none of them had thought to do so at that precise moment, for Industria was the last creature you would wish to have stumble upon you in such a state. She could expect as much from her secondary, for they could do little to change what they were, but laziness in humans, what were entirely capable of autonomous choice? It simply wasn't cricket.

Industria loaded the clothes into one of the many washing machines, added powder and fabric softener and put them on for a spin. Having dealt with the one thing, she decided it was high time to check in on that other minor matter what required her attention.

She stepped to the far right hand wall; which was largely vacant red brick. There was a pin pad here, which allowed for personages to enter the mansions vault.

Industria punched in the code, which was not at all as intricate as you might have supposed appropriate and seams plumped outwards from between the bricks; a light exhalation of dust drifting into the air in a manner which suggested that the room had long been left unattended. This was far from true. That which dwelt within had been making its rounds routinely since the moment of its arrival some days earlier. Industria had designed it as such. And hers was work what might never invite the humane insult of being described as substandard.

The Virtue pushed her broad hand against the bricks and swung the newly revealed door inwards. It closed behind her, but darkness was not something with which she was required to make the brief acquaintance. Lights flickered into immediate life along the ceiling. They were of the typically and garishly offensive overbright and much too white variety most readily associated with energy saver bulbs.

None of them flickered, though it might have been considered a nice touch, given the atmosphere. But these were installations what had been overseen by Industria herself. And she was never one to see electrical wires, nor bulbs draw close to their end of life phase if she had anything to do with it.

The vault was an interesting place, for it contained much of the worth and the hard workings what were to be expected of beings that had a great deal of getting on to be getting on with. Its length spanned the entire girth of Theresa's Hall and had been kitted out much as an overly fastidiously minded high school science teacher's laboratory. Even the workstations were comprised of toe scuffed wood grain bases and paisley green countertops what punitively snapped the mind back to the early nineteen-eighties.

Though the equipment what adorned them was nothing like what a matric level science teacher had ever before seen, the environment was so decidedly banal that one had to wonder whether the Vices and Virtue's were taken by some sort of bizarre sense of irony what made them chirrup in amusement to themselves whence undertaking some otherwise monotonous task. Who is to say? Being clever by virtue of being ancient does not at all suggest that one is by any means genuinely clever.

The one thing what might have been considered alarming and out of place, was the far left hand wall; which was lined with what appeared to be holding cells what's walls were entirely composed of glass. Upon closer inspection, however, this was glass what warped and burbled and would incite a not at all pleasant electric shock to your fingers if you were foolish enough to start poking about.

They were empty at this time, though their intention was perhaps to be filled at some point in the future. They had been outfitted in preparation as such; single beds with contrarily plump and accommodating looking mattresses. Shiny white porcelain toilets and accompanying bidets. Small bookshelves, with an assortment of bestsellers ranging from _My Sister's Keeper_ to Stephen King's iconic _It._ Some board games and jigsaw puzzles. Boggle featured, extensively.

Industria was not five steps into the room, when the creature what had been lost to the eyes of God swung down from the support beams.

It landed less than ten feet from where she was standing, screaming its miserable protestations all the while. Myriad arms extended, feathered wings quivering, it dominated the space; filled it, swallowed the air and the light and the darkness. Its cries reverberated deeply into the bare marrow of the Virtue's bones; an ardent wish of extrapolating exposits what begged to sear away the flesh and the heart beats and the life itself.

It came for her and the form was as beastly as it was beauteous and righteous and damnable. She felt its deepest most desire to render her down into less than the chemical stains upon the stone slab beneath her feet. She felt its cumulative and contrasting love and hatred, its forgiveness and its wrath all vying for point of purchase and compressing and compelling with every storied, torturous advent.

She raised the hammer. Directed its deciduous rubber peeled head towards the perfect monstrosity and felt its surety and uncertainty waver in all its myriad of distortions.

"Uh-uh-uh." She said, stepping forwards. Mjolnir thrummed with electrical magic, eager for release. "None of that. Ya remember what happened last time?"

The creature recoiled, sending economy brand science stations to shuddering in their foundations. It scrambled its way into the furthermost and darkest of corners what were at its disposal; emitting whimpers what were pitiful and animalistic. Two composite hands moved to claw at the column what one might suppose, in better light, to have resembled a neck.

"Shit, you _are_ a little worse for wear. Looks like the solderin' is comin' loose..." Industria sighed, puttering out air from between her lips. "What a pain... it's never any fun sedatin' a sturdy old thing like you. Still... I can't have ya gettin' about like that."

In a few long strides she had reached the corner. She plunged her arm down into the shadows and took into her grasp a leather strap what was bound about the creatures head and threaded to a bit what pressed into the corners of its cheeks. She yanked hard and the creature shrieked, as it was hurled back out into the light.

She dragged it towards one of the glass enclosures; an outcome to which the creature took noticeable exception. It elicited once more its soul shattering scream; variant limbs thrashing and striking, enamel gnashing.

"Hey, hey!" Industria swung her arm back behind her head; Mjolnir clenched tightly in her powerful fist. Power crackled down the length of her arm like a livewire awaiting the pool of water what would circulate its current to greater lengths still. "What did I say about pitchin' a fit? Any more of your cheek and I'll shove this hammer fair up your fuckin' arse!"

The creature quietened, for it had more the likely felt the blow of the hammer any number of times in its existence and did not much care for a repeat of it. With much lesser in the means of resistance, Industria was able to drag its contortioned body into one of the waiting glass cages and bring the magically enforced wall shut sharply in its wake.

She prepared the tools for the surgery with a cheerful whistle. The creature was quiet for the most part; if but for one low, keening appeal. The Virtue smiled at it.

"Come now," She said. "Chins up. You won't be alone for long."

She continued to whistle her cheery tune, taking up a scalpel between her fingers and examining the sharpness of its edges. The creature screamed; unheard, unheeded and helpless; its wings of black and white fluttering and smashing against the sparking seams of a cage what could by no means compare to the bars what comprised the very nature of its monstrous existence.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry it was mainly just OC stuff today, folks! Next time, we check back in with Aziraphale and Crowley and experience the fallout from very impetuous decisions made on a full beer belly and an ill-advised chocking of MDMA.
> 
> If you are so inclined lovely readers, please feel free to express your thoughts via the comments box. Or, if you haven't already done so; give that kudos button a kick in the human genitals!
> 
> The next chapter is going to take a little more work, so I estimate that my next update is going to be roughly around Sunday the 22nd of Feb. If I get it done before then, fantastic, but we'll see how we go :)
> 
> Until next time and with all my infernal love,
> 
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	56. Or, in which it is hard to do a walk of shame, in only ten feet of space.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back, lovely readers! My thanks as always to those who read and kudo-ed since the last chapter, I appreciate all of you who take time out of your day to spend with this little story of mine! Extra special thanks of course goes to those particular lovelies who left comments! You guys always boost my spirits, and I appreciate your extra bit of effort so very much :) Thankyou!
> 
> Good Omens-ervation of the day: A little bit of a random one, but I'm kind of bummed that the piece of dialogue about Aziraphale bringing shortbread/biscuits on the road trip to track down the Anti-Christ wasn't included. I can just imagine Aziraphale holding out a biscuit, going "Would you like one in the shape of a Christmas bell, Crowley?" And Crowley being all, "No, I don't want one in the shape of a bloody bell!" To which Aziraphale would hunch in his seat, effect a sulk whilst nibbling on the corner of the bell shaped short bread and mutter: "No need so as to take it out on me just because YOU lost the Anti-Christ. You didn't see ME losing Jesus, did you?"
> 
> Got the chapter finished much earlier than expected everyone, which is always a marvellous surprise! Hope that you enjoy :)

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 5:35am~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's - London Soho...** _

_**Nine months to the apex...** _

Crowley was a demon what could sleep for the infernal regions when the urge took him.

Prior to his assuming gainful employment, he was a creature what would not have been caught dead reefing himself out of unconsciousness at an hour in which the sky still wore the moon as its pendant. He'd had more than enough of that in the many thousands of years prior to his acquiring an automobile; a deciding factor what largely obliterated the need for him to rise before the cock had so much as considered giving its first preliminary, and, often deeply resented, caw.

Early mornings were, more often than not, a cold and miserable affair. A time in which grass was bristled to a hedgehog like density by frost, the air so frigid it would turn your breath to fog, and beleaguered further by stalwart bicycle enthusiasts with far too much in the way of heat insulating Lycra, and in possession each of jovial, somehow always pretentiously cheerful sounding bells what they would itinerantly 'bling-bling' for no good reason other to piss off anyone else what had the sense to be appropriately moody at a time in which the sun had so far failed to dip its toe into the shallows of the day.

Mornings had no place existing, where this particular demon was concerned. Which was why he considered it especially cheeky to have been woken from his otherwise blissful, illicit substance induced slumber at such a detestable hour. He would have much preferred to have slept, uninterrupted, for at least a good twenty-four accumulative hours, so as to permit his weary human body time in which to recover from the exertions gifted by the events of the previous evening.

But awake he now was and as such, intimately aware of any number of things he would much prefer so as to _not_ be made aware of. Namely, how very fucking sore he was.

Not just sore in the... place what was to be expected, but sore pretty much everywhere. His upper back, his thighs, his glutes... as though he had done something as ludicrous as taking up jogging and had thrown himself headfirst into the task without first properly stretching.

His head ached, his tongue felt like a leather strap flopping about in a cave of crusty scabs, and his rear end felt as though it had been taken to with the business end of a crowbar.

He had never regretted being awake more in his entire life. And had never felt happier for it.

Crowley eased himself ever so carefully onto his side. A damp hand towel what had been draped across his back slithered down onto the fitted sheet, gathering in a cool, moist ball against the curve of his spine. Aziraphale had placed it there when they had finally staggered to bed; a means of trying to keep Crowley's body temperature down during the warm night. There wasn't much else covering him, what with the exception of one of the top sheets; which clung to his hip in a listless, contrary manner as he blundered his way up out of the pillow into which his cheek had been buried.

Ordinarily, he would have hiked the sheet up so as to cover himself, but he was still too dazed, still too hungover. They may have flushed the MDMA out of their systems before passing out, but neither he nor Aziraphale had taken the time to sober up, which meant that the demons head was rendered as predictably foggy as a Scottish moor in the middliest of winter dawns.

Aziraphale froze as Crowley's bleary eyes gradually dribbled onto him. Though the room was still dark, the demons gaze cut through the gloom with quite as much ease as a hungry owl in search of its first mouthful of squealing breakfast. The angel, he could see, was dressed; quite as buttoned up and as fussily as always, and currently bent in two, with a hand pressed tightly to his left calf. The sound what had woken Crowley had been him banging into one of his decorative chairs in the dark. There was a great deal of white surmounting the borders of the angels' pupils; making him look altogether too much like a frightened animal what had been caught in the grip of a hunters spotlight.

Crowley eased his elbow up onto one of the pillows, pausing so as to puff at a limpet of hair what fanned across his throbbing forehead. He hadn't bothered with brushing it following their... shower, and had simply permitted it room in which to do as it pleased. Which appeared to be morphing itself into some semblance of a drowned Pekinese.

"Well... good morning." He said, with a smile. A smile what sinuously referenced as much as what had occurred the previous night, as it did Aziraphale's blatantly sober attempts to subvert the reality of it for as long as possible.

The offering of the standard, congenial address, even whence heavily laden with insinuation, proved nonetheless comforting to the angel. He straightened up, his own smile decidedly strained and gave that ever so expected nervous titter what routinely prefaced those conversations he did not at all want to have.

"Oh. Yes." He glanced his palms down the front of his vest, noticeably devoid of its customary gold fob. Crowley's scratchy memory drew a blank as to whether it might have been ripped off and passionately hurtled across the bookshop at some point the previous evening. "Good morning."

Crowley sniffed, smacking his jerkied tongue about his mouth like a panicked salmon on a fishing trawler. "Ugh... feels like I've had a vacuum hose stuck in my mouth all night," He said, passing the back of his hand over his lips and grimacing at the white, gooey strands that adhered themselves to it. Residue alone of what was nothing more exciting than dried skin and nocturnal salivation, and ever the more surprising; given how dry he was.

Aziraphale, obviously embarrassed by the unintentional reference to things being stuck in mouths, was nonetheless compelled to provide assistance. It was, in the very least, a distraction from other... matters.

"Oh... yes. Let me... just..." He bumbled his way back into the ensuite, tripping over his own feet in the process. Crowley observed, one brow quirked in somnolent amusement, as the angel reappeared a moment later with a very tall glass of water. He approached the bed as though it posed the same level of physical risk as a sleep-deprived tiger and offered the glass to the demon. "Here. You should... probably drink this."

"Thanks." Crowley said, switching on the bedside lamp before then taking the glass and sculling the contents in one fell swoop. It felt like much too little too late, but at least it took some of the fuzzy feeling out of his mouth.

He used a fingernail to scrape some crusty afterthoughts from the corners of his lips and picked at his eyes. Geez... he must have looked a mess. And not even a hot mess. A 'just been extracted from the boot of a hot car after three days of being quietly expired inside of it' sort of mess.

Aziraphale took a step back from the bed, his eyes unable to find a suitable point on which to perch themselves. His fingertips meandered along the gallows between each knuckle; one thumbnail lightly grazing against the cuticle of the other. Even if Crowley had not known the angel quite as long as he had, it would have been no complex task to have picked up on the nervous energy what filtered from his celestial pores like a rusted sieve.

"How did you um... sleep?" Aziraphale asked and the demon felt his nose wrinkle at the starchiness of the formality. Who did he think he was fooling with this schtick? Did it actually suit him to pretend as though they had only just met?

"When I did: like a rock," He replied, not about to let the angel's awkwardness ruin his good mood. He didn't have the energy for it, anyway. "World could have ended again and I wouldn't have noticed."

Aziraphale gave another nervous titter. He was starting to sound suspiciously like a high strung woodpecker in desperate need of a Valium. "Oh yes. Jolly good."

 _Jolly good,_ Crowley thought, doing his very best to keep his lips from twisting about to form an unattractive knot. Could have been worse, he supposed. He might have described the entire affair as 'tickety-boo'.

A demon could perhaps abide his naked, water drenched body being referred to as 'scrumptious', but if Aziraphale ever once took it upon himself to categorize raw, wild, rambunctious sex as 'tickety-boo' Crowley might very well just have to put them both out of their misery. Some words just ought to be left behind zipped lips. Or, more pertinently, sequestered firmly to the trash pile of history.

Crowley set his glass on the bedside table. His fingers trembled a bit. He was very hungover and feeling more than a little to the distant verge of average.

"Strange..." He murmured, shifting over onto his back and reaching down to hike up the sheet. Aziraphale looked intensely relieved. "I'm suddenly craving a smoke..."

The angel took a moment out from acting awkward and constipated so as to drift back into the comfortable realm of dulcet properness. "Well, if that's the case, you had best pop your dressing gown on, and go outside," He flicked a finger towards the chair on which Crowley's robe was indeed draped. "I won't have you smoking in the bedroom."

"Oh?" Crowley responded, with the sneakiest of smirks. He knew full well that what he was about to say would only rattle Aziraphale further, but not all medicine needed sugar so as to help it go down. "But it's alright for _you_ to be smoking in the bedroom?"

The dark of the room was not sufficient enough so as to hide the flush what crept its way up from beneath Aziraphale's collar. Lips what had only hours earlier been so improperly rimmed about Crowley's sex trembled and gawped in helpless abandonment; unfit to make form of whatever words might have sought to otherwise present themselves.

Crowley, uncertain as to whether or not he was pleased by the reaction, decided that driving the nail home was far the preferred option to leaving its sharpened tip jutting out so as to catch upon the metaphorical foot. Blessed if he was going to get about the rest of the day tiptoeing on eggshells just to assuage Aziraphale's eleventh hour sensibilities.

"Guess there is some truth to the old sex stereotypes," He said, making certain to add emphasis to the word 'sex'. Just in case it suited the angel to pretend that what they had done the previous evening was little more than an enthusiastic clothes free cuddle. "Including the sneaking out before breakfast one..."

"I'm not... sneaking out!" Aziraphale exclaimed, quite as much offended by the accusation as he was in fact, lying. Crowley turned his head sideways across the pillow, lifting both brows slowly in a show of how entirely unimpressed he was.

"You were getting dressed. Very quietly. ...In the dark."

"I was trying to be considerate and not wake you," Aziraphale said, though he did not look directly at Crowley whilst doing so. A sure fire sign that he was flirting with the nape of dishonesty. "You get so little sleep these days because of your work."

"How you managed to roll out of bed without waking me in the first place is anyone's guess." The demon said, supposing the defence had not been an altogether unreasonable one. He offered a slow, purposeful wink of his left eye; far from done with teasing. "Guess you wore me out."

Aziraphale continued to look as though he were slowly and torturously dying from embarrassment. His own eyes might well have been composed of lead, for they seemed incapable now of directing their gaze any higher than the floor. They lingered there, as though consumed with interest by a dust bunny which would not have, under any circumstance, have been permitted to exist in Aziraphale's bedroom in the first place.

"Well... I had, uh... best be getting back to the bookshop," He drifted towards the door, unnecessarily straightening an already perfectly symmetrical bow tie as he went. "Plenty of work what needs doing and all..."

"Angel... we're _in_ your bookshop." Crowley said; uncertain as to whether he did in fact want to laugh at the angel's embarrassed display, more than he wanted to round off at him for it. For the love of someone, was there anything more anally retentive in all the known universe than a celestial working its way through... anything?

"... Oh... right." Aziraphale at least possessed the good grace to laugh at himself. "Well. That's certainly saved me the trip."

"You feel like breakfast?" Crowley asked, stretching his arms up above his head. He felt a couple of pops as air was displaced from his cramped joints. "I'm craving oil, I don't know about you. And salt. Wouldn't think I'd need salt given how dehydrated I am... Bacon, maybe... or Hash browns... Proper English breakfast. Couple of those little sausages, you know?"

"I'll go and put the kettle on. Poach you an egg, get you a piece of toast," Aziraphale said, which was clearly quite as much effort as he was currently prepared to go to in regards to making breakfast. He did in fact look completely offended and disgusted by the demon's suggestion of a 'proper English breakfast'; an offering that was far from the realm of Aziraphale's contemporary standards. An avocado and feta smash with a poached egg, he might very well have handled, but a _hash brown?_

Aziraphale could recall only the one occasion in all of history in which he had conceded to eating a hash brown. He had in fact been hungover at the time and craving something oily. Crowley had been wolfing into a small plateful with the sort of vicious enthusiasm of a starving Rottweiler, and the angel found himself intrigued as to what sort of food it was that a habitually unconcerned demon found so appealing.

It was much too oily, much too salty, and flecked with specks of charcoal that had sheared themselves away from the edges of the grilled sausages what accompanied them. Everything on Crowley's plate had the essence of pure, diffused motor oil; so much so that you could just about feel the pimples popping out of your pores just by looking at it.

Crowley cleared his throat as the angel, distracted by his deep and utter revulsion pertaining to early morning fry-ups, paused in the midst of opening the bedroom door.

"Aren't you forgetting something?"

Aziraphale silently admonished himself for his behaviour. He realized how all of this must have looked to Crowley, and it was far from flattering. He needed to pull himself together.

Difficult though it was. He didn't feel at all like himself. His head was blurry, his thoughts a jagged, jumbled mess. Every once in a while, his heart would take to pounding violently in his chest; though there had been nothing, so far as he could tell, what had triggered it off.

There had been a few moments where he had even felt like crying. His eyes had gotten so far as welling up, before he managed to get himself under control.

Regret and remorse circled through his dozy mind; taking merciless nips of his less than steady constitution. He felt that the bites were coming much harder and faster now, and it was harder than ever to keep his resolve treading water. To keep its head above the waters that wanted so desperately to drag him down; to submerge and overwhelm him.

_It wasn't..._

_... supposed to..._

"Oh... Yes. Of course," He said, with the offer of a smile what any discerning customer would have demanded a full refund for. Never the mind that it had been given freely. Crowley supposed that the only reason Aziraphale bothered smiling in the first place was because he was so ostensibly practiced at doing so. It was a learned response, particularly in situations that he found distasteful. Reporting to his pompous angelic line-managers, in particular.

Crowley had seen the smile more than a few times in the thousands of years what comprised their acquaintance. It was, however, customarily directed at other people.

The demon felt anger open up inside of him like flesh parting to either side of a sharpened knife. That horrible, false, insincere smile what did not reach the corners of Aziraphale's mouth, let alone the shallows of his eyes... He didn't deserve that.

It was Aziraphale who had initiated it. It was _he_ who had seduced Crowley, not the other way around.

To have drifted so close in those precious hours, only now to find him perched up, little more than a speck in the distance...

Still wearing that cold, non-committal smile.

Aziraphale placed a hand along the side of Crowley's face, brushing his thumb over the rise of his cheek. A place in his eyes did at last see fit to soften. The demon felt a little weak with relief and the stinging edges of the wound that the anger had opened up in him dimmed. He parted his lips for Aziraphale's kiss, reaching up to secure an arm about his shoulders and pull him back into the billowing of the tides.

Crowley was tired and sore but bubbling over with such intense feelings of love, he didn't quite know what to do with it. The sensations seemed to have intensified in the wake of what they had shared. He battled the urge to drive the hypothetical snake-skin boot into all that 'morning after' awkwardness and simply drag Aziraphale back into the bed and push himself tightly into the angel's hold; press the bare plains of their flesh together and surrender to their desires the once more.

Instead, he pressed his forehead against Aziraphale's with a smile what was perhaps one of the truest and thereby most vulnerable of that which he had ever permitted purchase upon his face. He knew that the angel was struggling with any other manner of feelings and consternations and did not want to make it worse. Such as with all steps taken in their shared journey; there was a process to be observed and in Aziraphale's case, the process meandered by way of a particularly rocky road.

"That's better," Crowley said, sinking back against the pillows and fluttering his fingers in a shooing motion. "Go on, then. Scoot."

With a firm grip still maintained upon that infuriatingly awkward smile, Aziraphale reversed away from the bed as though taking his leave from supreme court. He opened the door and attempted to sidestep through it; almost taking out the frame with his hip as he went. Crowley fancied he had seen hens what were less nervous come Christmas time and once more reminded himself, frustrating as it was, to be patient.

Things had gotten very fast between them the previous night and Aziraphale was the sort of creature who clearly got motion sick with barely any rocking of the boat. He needed time and space in which to find his sea legs.

Crowley stretched beneath the bedsheet; pulling his toes in towards the heels of his feet. There was a small pop somewhere deep in his hips and a couple of cracks echoed their sentiments further down.

He felt like an accordion what had been crammed into too small a storage space and left there a year. All of his muscles felt compressed. Things ached. Some more deeply than others.

A smile formed on his face. Little wonder he was sore; given what Aziraphale had done to him the previous night. What he had done and _how_ he had done it, for that matter.

_Just goes to show what those failsafe's were holding back._

Crowley slipped a hand curiously under his hip and fingered the space between his arse cheeks. It was still very tender and felt a little sticky. He gathered that Aziraphale would be in here changing the sheets just as soon as Crowley had hauled himself out of bed. There was only so much 'love' they had been able to clean up the previous night and some of it had obviously been working its way out of Crowley's body in the interim.

Images of the intimacies they had shared wended their way through Crowley's tired, satisfied mind. Memories of being borne down by the angel's ravenous, uncompromising desires; of being taken into a warm mouth and suckled. The feeling of those strong fingers weaving in and out of his body; stretching, pinching at delicious nerve endings...

Those hard, exquisite thrusts what filled him to absolute breaking point... what wrought whimpers and soft pleas for the pleasure derived from the stroking of those sepulchre channels.

He had never cum so hard in his life. The intensity of his orgasm was laughably incomparable to all those preceding it. Much like comparing spinning tea cups to a roller coaster. Nothing he had ever done to himself could come close to what the two of them had shared. What Aziraphale had given him.

 _And I'm not a virgin anymore,_ Crowley thought and surprised himself with the thought. He had never actually considered himself to have 'been' a virgin before. Not really.

It seemed to him a silly mortal world, used in tandem to describe a state what was at the same time admirable and embarrasssing. As though there was some great importance associated with the 'losing' of one's virginity; as though there was some integral worth bestowed upon the individual what had surrendered their body to the carnal attentions of another.

Crowley didn't feel much different. He certainly didn't feel 'transformed' or any the wiser, though he had certainly learned a lot. The most obvious thing that he felt was a substantial deepening of affection and love for Aziraphale; as though the magnetism had been strengthened in their making love.

The demon turned his head on the pillow; smacking his dry, flaky lips. He was really craving that cigarette now, which was an odd thing, given that he wasn't a creature habitually subject to cravings. Nonetheless, he found himself really wanting to smoke, and was in such a cosy mood he could find little reason to deny himself the indulgence. Hey, wasn't like it was going to kill him.

Crowley heaved himself out of bed and lazily drifted over to the decorative chair on which his dressing gown was draped. As he wrapped the black velvet around his still sensitive body and knotted the cord, he tried to remember where he had left his cigarettes. He recalled having plucked them up off of the table before leaving the bar, but they'd certainly not been in the back pocket of his trousers when he and Aziraphale had gotten... busy. The angel's hands would have crushed them into oblivion; the enthusiasm with which he had been mauling Crowley's buttocks.

The demon breezed on out into the store front; meandering his way back through the foggy moor of his questionable memory. Aziraphale was installed within the kitchenette and hyper focusing on the kettle with such intensity Crowley doubted it ever likely to reach boiling point. Honestly; the only way in which the angel could further retreat would be to open up the refrigerator and crawl inside of the vegetable crisper.

There was sugar scattered all over the countertop, from where Aziraphale's trembling fingers had forced an encounter between the loaded spoon and the edge of the coffee mugs. He hadn't yet wiped it up; a telling indictment as to just how preoccupied the angel was with his thoughts.

Crowley pursed his lips together, wondering whether he ought to say something. It was an urge he quickly dispensed with. He knew what Aziraphale was like; most of these conclusions he needed to come to in his own time. He was stubborn that way, and still very much an angel; in so far as his sensibilities went. Forcing an angel to comply with your own way of thinking only resulted in them folding in on themselves like wet origami. Or, if they were anything like Aziraphale's superiors, a simple and unequivocal refusal to so much as entertain whatever it was you were saying.

It was painful and frustrating and there was nothing for it. Nothing but time, and a little bit of patience. Two things of which Crowley was, unsurprisingly, rather the well acquainted with.

"Be careful you don't burn yourself," He called out, nonetheless. Aziraphale could be a dopey old bastard, and never the more so then when he was distracted by troubling thoughts.

The angel gave a start and just about dropped the egg he had been holding onto the floor. He had been standing there with it clenched between his fingers the whole time, Crowley realized and vaguely pondered the possibility of it hatching. Magic could be screwy like that, and with Aziraphale being as off with the fairies as he was...

"Yes. Yes. Rather." The angel fussed, giving an additional flinch as the kettle reached boil and emitted its high pitched, attention grabbing shriek. He quickly poured water into the two coffee cups, nearly missing them entirely and then sloshed the rest, rather inelegantly and dangerously, into a small saucepan he had set on the stovetop. Crowley winced, biting his lower lip and wishing desperately to intervene. This _was_ an angel after all, who had once managed to cut his thumb down to the bone spreading butter on a piece of toast. He _had_ been using paring knife at the time, but even that was evidence in and of itself that Aziraphale should not, in good conscience, be left to his own devices in the kitchen.

The angel gave each of the coffee's a perfunctory stir, near about splattering the cups contents all over the kitchen bench in the process, before ferrying one over to where Crowley was anxiously observing.

"There you are." He said, the corner of his lips having a go at forming a smile what his anxieties quickly shook apart like a house wife fluttering a sheet into place over a bed. Crowley took a sip of the coffee and was not quick enough so as to keep his lip from twisting. Aziraphale had added perhaps a half a teaspoon's too much sugar, which was unusual, given that he had been making the demon's coffee long enough to be able to do so in the dark.

Ah, well. If anything, it would probably wake him up faster.

"Thanks," He said, wondering if Aziraphale had caught him puckering up his face such as he had. It would seem not, as the angel's eyes were set at shoulder height; as though Crowley had a lustrously coloured parrot perched there whose brilliant plumage was taking up all of his attention.

"I will, uh... get back to your egg," The angel said, drudging his way back towards the kitchenette; the aforementioned egg still clutched in his hand. Crowley was surprised he hadn't squeezed it into a fistful of shattered shell and drippy yolk by now. It was probably already curdling with salmonella.

The demon sighed, took another sip of his overly saccharine coffee and permitted himself his first proper look at the now eponymous 'Ground Zero.'

The book shop, whilst always a purposeful study in organized chaos, looked as though it had been turned inside out and then reassembled by a bung eyed cobbler whose thumbs had been replaced with toes. Books were strewn across the floor; upended from the display table which Crowley had succeeding in capsizing by way of backing into it. It lay on the floor, like a drunken teenager splayed out in a curb along the Circle Line Pub crawl; one decoratively carved and varnished chipped leg pointed towards the ceiling.

There were white feathers dotted about; some resting on book covers, some having been propelled so high into the air that they had found their place of purchase upon the very tops of the surrounding shelves. One had even settled itself into the inside of the black hat what Aziraphale had hanging from his coat rack; nestled in like a squirrel in the hallow of a tree trunk.

Crowley's clothes had been pitched punitively into each of the cardinal directions; fanning out from one particular spot on the floor to which the demon purposefully avoided paying too much attention. Not from lack of shame, of course, but more for the fact that there was likely a grisly mess what desperately required the healing glance of the wash cloth, and Crowley really didn't have the strength to deal with that right now. Most of his job these days revolved around sponging up the various fluids what navigated their way out of humans bodies and he wasn't at all keen to devote himself to such a task when it was in fact his day off.

He managed to locate his trousers; which had been tossed just offside of one of the bookshelves and from these, he extricated his briefs. He stepped into the legs and wiggled them up his hips. It simply wouldn't do to go outside for a smoke and have a passing breeze billow up the base of his dressing gown and expose his swimsuit region for the neighbours to see. There were certain things only Aziraphale got a free pass for, and they were most certainly not up for the inspection of curious humans.

Crowley's muddled brain gave a pneumatic ding as the memory of where he had left his cigarettes burst into focus. He had placed them in the Bentley's glove box; where he had taken to storing them out of respect for Aziraphale. The angel had not wanted to suffer the temptation of having them within potential reach, lest he surrender to his impulses and start helping himself. Such as what had happened the previous night, ironically.

The demon groaned, not much fancying the thought of swanning out the front of the shop in his dressing gown. A lot of trades people making their way to work at that time in the morning, and him with such seductive looking calves...

He rationalized that they had used quite a great deal of what might have been considered 'unnecessary magic' the previous night (to wit, Crowley was extensively relieved and far the more comfortable for the expenditure) and with a snap of his fingers, miracled the cigarettes into the pocket of his robe. He glanced towards the kitchen, hoping that the angel hadn't noticed him pulling a swiftie, but Aziraphale was still staring off into the middle distance; lost in the tangled web of his own thoughts. Egg still resolutely clutched between his fingers like a beige coloured safety blanket.

Trying not to let the angel's stupid mood get to him, Crowley limped his way through the laundry and pushed open the door what led to the courtyard. The air outside was still very warm and the demon supposed the day what was soon to break, would prove every bit as stifling as the one what had preceded it.

He eased himself down into one of the steel chairs what belonged to the antiquated outdoor setting, wincing a little at a sharp pain what resonated from deep inside of his body. Aziraphale had healed him after their first go around, but Crowley had managed to put him off after their session in the shower. He wondered if it had in fact been such a smart idea after all.

 _Bless... feels like he split me down the middle with a blockbuster,_ he thought, setting down his coffee cup and plucking a fag out from the carton in his pocket. It was an assessment which strangely enough made him smile.

He lit his cigarette, took a deep drag and rubbed his ankles together. He had never considered himself to be a particularly sensuous creature, but he suddenly felt much more attractive and appealing than he had ever done in his entire life. There was a small, brazen part of him what almost hoped one of the neighbours might look over the fence. See him sitting there, long bare legs stretched out underneath the table, robe parted alluringly at the throat, exposing a long line of hairy chest.

He reached up, brushing his fingers over the bruise what adorned the side of his neck. It stung a little, for Aziraphale had punctured the flesh with his teeth, and there were a lot of blood vessels what had been ruptured by the hunger of his kiss.

Crowley sighed, tilting his head back and taking another deep drag of the cigarette. Memories of the night before came floating back up in his mind. As though the smoke from the cigarette was forming edges around what had until that point been precious more than blurs in the gloom.

Aziraphale ripping his shirt open, his kiss and his tongue lending itself to the skin what dwelt beneath. His hands grasping, yanking, pulling him towards him so that his arms were thrown up over his head. Kisses what had dazed and dazzled the demon; had sent his faculties reeling.

The feeling of that first thrust; painful, selfish, covetous. Aziraphale's admission; that he did not wish to stop, likely would _not_ have stopped.

That look on his face... the savouring of the joining, the intensity of their physical bodies having at long last come together.

The way his lovely features had formed a stricken rictus; caught betwixt ecstasy and fear at the creeping sensation of his encroaching orgasm... The first he had ever experienced.

Crowley took another puff of his cigarette; eased the fumes out. Felt a small sprig of bitterness dig its nails into his mind.

Oh, if only the bloody angel wasn't persisting in acting so cagey about it.

This was not how the morning after was supposed to go. They should have still been lying together in bed, the two of them. Passing soft, lazy kisses across the bows of the pillows. Fingertips grazing lightly, purposelessly across forearms; the hair there prickling and purring with the flesh's new found sensitivity.

Eyes shyly beseeching and entreating. Nervously chuckling; languishing in their bemusement. In the wonder of what they had shared.

Not this... feeling stranded upon two separate islands, metaphorical high heels pinched between fingers, racoon eyed mascara and eyeliner smeared walk of shame, nonsense.

He was jolted out of his contemplations by the laundry door swinging open. Aziraphale made his way over to the table; a small plate in one hand and Crowley's mobile phone in the other. He set the plate down first. The toast looked much the way a match might if all the wood had been scraped off. There was some suspicious traces of char about the edges which suggested that Aziraphale had in fact burned the bread, and attempted to remedy it by scraping off the charcoal with the side of a knife.

The egg had not been very well drained, and most of the water what had once adhered to its surface had successfully rendered the piece of toast upon which it was perching into the equivalent of a kitchen sponge. The yolk was indeed runny; in so saying that the egg was, for the most part, uncooked. A thin, almost translucent edge had formed about the contents; a solidification of essence that was only marginally stronger than fairy floss. It wobbled about on the plate threateningly, like a volcano on the verge of eruption. Almost daring Crowley to look at it wrong.

"Someone was trying to call you." Aziraphale said, setting a fork upside down beside Crowley's plate before then passing him his phone. Crowley, very the much distracted by the comically blundered state of his breakfast, took a moment to notice it.

"Oh... thanks." He said, remembering dimly that he had set the phone down on Aziraphale's study desk the night before. He took it and glanced at the 'Missed call' window what had appeared on the screen. He groaned. "It's work."

"Well you had best call them back." Aziraphale’s voice had already assumed a practiced chiding tone, as though fully expecting Crowley to have stowed the phone in his dressing gown pocket and pretend as though he hadn't noticed the call at all. In fairness, it was an assumption largely supported by evidence.

"Yes, all right. I was getting there," The demon grumbled, taking note of how Aziraphale's eyes flickered ever so briefly towards the cigarette in his fingers. He couldn't tell what it was the angel was feeling in that moment, which was unusual for a demon what knew him better than the back of his own hand.

"Did you... want one?" He asked, tapping ash into the tray what Aziraphale had started keeping there for that very reason. He immediately regretted it, for the angel's features darkened and he looked intensely annoyed at Crowley for having said anything at all.

"No. I don't." He snapped. "I shouldn't have had the ones I did last night."

"Okay, sorry I asked," Crowley said, adding a bit of firmness to his tone. Just because Aziraphale was in a mood didn't give him a free pass to dump it all on Crowley. He noticed a red mark on the angels hand, and gestured to it with the cigarette. "What you gone and done there?"

"Oh." Aziraphale glanced his fingers over the mark distractedly. "Burned myself on the kettle."

"Course you did." Crowley reached out so as to take Aziraphale's hand and bring it to his lips, but the angel had already drifted back towards the shop, healing the mark as he went.

 _Fuck you,_ Crowley thought and then felt terrible for having thought it in the first place. It was hard not to be a little bitter, though. All well and good for Aziraphale to pounce on him the night before, and then to turn it around so that he felt like the bad guy.

_'I'm the nice one. I don't have to kill children.'_

_'You can't expect me to do the dirty work!'_

_Yeah? Well, jokes on you, angel. You DID do the dirty work. You did it, and you LOVED it. Time you grew up and took some responsibility for your decisions._

_You're the one who had your tongue in my arse, after all._

Crowley blew a puff of smoke towards the door as it swung shut. He hoped some of the smell got into the laundry room. Wended on in and adhered its toxic stink to the pages of the angels ever so precious books.

 _I hope we did it on some 1st Editions. That'll_ really _get his hackles up. Won't be a brush delicate enough to lift_ those _stains._

_Yeah, you're a nice one, all right. Nice enough to treat me like three day old dogshit whenever it suits you. You and your stupid uneven nostrils._

_No blood on your hands._

_Lot more than blood on your hands last night, wasn't there?_

Crowley pulled himself up short. What use was there in being vile and indulging his temper? It was no better than what Aziraphale was doing. If he wasn't prepared to march on in there and pull the angel up on his behaviour, then he had no place complaining about it. Even internally.

Besides, he loved Aziraphale. He loved him, he understood him, and, more to the point, he understood his shortcomings. He always had.

_He'll come around. Of course he will. He loves you. You KNOW he loves you._

_His failsafe's have been removed. It's a hard thing to deal with. You know just as well as any demon how difficult that is._

_All the barriers ripped away. The breadth of the world expanding before your very eyes..._

_Relearning your limits. If you had a care enough to do so._

Crowley sighed, tapped ash from his cigarette and unlocked his phone. He brought up Rita's number, dialled it and took a sip from his too sweet coffee as he waited. The egg remained untouched; its fibrous edges glistening with bacterial intent.

Rita picked up after the first ring. It wasn't a good sign.

"Hello?" She sounded particularly harried. Another warning sign. Crowley was regretting calling back more by the moment.

"Yeah. It's Anthony." He replied, flicking another chunk of ash into the tray. Some of it splintered free before it closed the gap and got swept away in the breeze.

Rita didn't bother with masking her relief. "Thank you for calling back so quickly," she said, with the sort of sigh that was usually opined by a hand being pressed against the upper ridge of the breastbone. "Sorry to disturb you on your day off, but I've got a bit of a staffing issue. Steph is having some sort of trouble with getting someone to watch her boy. Apparently her mother is able to, but it's going to take her a while to get there, which means she won't be able to start until 10:30 at the latest."

Crowley did his best to stifle the groan that threatened to leak out. Steph was scheduled to work the early morning shift for sector B. Her not being able to get in meant that they were down a worker for wake-ups, medications, breakfast and linen detail. Tasks what were simply impossible for one staff member to complete on their own.

"I know its' your day off, but I was wondering if you might be able to head in and cover those first few hours for us?" Rita asked, her tone suitably apologetic. It was not the first time she had contacted Crowley with an urgent request for coverage. He had garnered something of a reputation for being available on short notice; given that he and Aziraphale had been spending some time apart and any distraction what presented itself had been a useful one. "You know they're the busiest."

"There's no one else?" Crowley asked, taking up his fork and giving one of the bulbous edges of the egg an ill-advised poke. The sinewy barrier split apart under the menial amount of pressure; the orange yolk pumping free with the commitment of a severed artery.

"No one else. I tried Alice, but she's not picking up."

 _She's a smarter woman than I am,_ Crowley thought, pushing the plate aside with the tips of his fingers. He didn't want to go into work; not after everything that had happened the previous night. He wasn't feeling particularly clever, and wagered that whatever tasks he performed would be substandard, at best. He was hungover, headachy, sore in a half dozen other additional places and in possession of a stomach what swirled with the thoughtful pretence of nausea.

But then, he thought, perhaps it wasn't the worst idea. Against all evidence to the historical contrary, he did in fact _like_ his workplace, and felt a sort of responsibility to it that he hadn't even experienced when working for Hell.

It would also permit Aziraphale some space in which to come to terms with what had happened between them the previous night. It had proven very helpful those few months earlier, allowing him to adjust to the shift in their relationship dynamic. A couple of hours quiet in which to work through his feelings, settle his nerves and clean up. By the time Crowley finished his shift, Aziraphale would likely be as right as rain and ready to talk about it all without screwing up his face like a quiche what had been punched in the middle.

"Yeah, okay," Crowley said, crushing the filter of his cigarette into the ash tray with a punitive twist of his index finger. "I can come in for a couple of hours."

"Thanks, pet. You just make sure and add it to your timesheet."

Money wasn't yet an object to Crowley, but he was touched all the same by Rita's thoughtfulness. Weekend shifts were highly prized by the nursing staff, as it was time and a half on Saturday's and double time on Sunday's. Why the subtle increase on the Sunday he wasn't certain, unless it was some archaic reference to person's needing to sacrifice their morning church service so as to come into work. Crowley could only imagine that poor Stephanie; a single mother with a mortgage, a dog and bills to pay, would be kicking herself for the loss of those hours. To low income earners, every hour worked was the difference between keeping the lights on, bread in the cupboard, and paper on the toilet roll.

"I'll be there as soon as I can," He advised, brushing a few stray shards of ash off of the outdoor setting. Some of them settled in the still oozing yolk of his egg, which he could hardly pretend to feel distressed about. "Just gotta shower and get dressed. Should be about an hour away."

He finished the call and took a moment so as to slurp up the last remaining dregs of his coffee. He noticed that a message had come in from Alice; not three minutes after midnight. She must have been three sheets to the wind when she had sent it, because most of the spelling was incorrect and she had double spaced and formed new paragraphs between run on sentences:

 _ **"Hey mate,"** _it began. _" **Lisen soz if i got yas in trubel with Alex ove th** _**_stpid tablets. dont want youse guys fightng jus coz shit s fucked up in my life. luv yas so much ya a top bloke both yas! hope evertingx ok give alex a kiss from me and tel him he looks hot shit in a vest xxx ooo"_**

This was a strange one for Crowley. Sure, he got messages from people through his social media all the time. _Sneck Antix_ on Instagram did especially good business, if he dared say so himself. But he wasn't accustomed to human's he was acquainted with expressing actual care and consideration for him as a... well, as a person, he supposed.

It was nice, he decided; loathe that he customarily was to ascribe the word nice to anything. But he had grown fond of the work girls and they in turn, seemed to have (appropriately enough) taken him under their wing. Which was not a simple thing to do, he would be the first to admit. He wasn't the easiest creature to get along with. He was moody and sharp tongued, and more often than not, an unapologetic pain in the proverbial.

He pecked out a reply to Alice, assuring her that all was well and best regards for the hellish hangover that she would no doubt be nursing when she finally dragged her mussed up head of hair out of the pillow in which it was currently buried. He slipped the phone into his pocket, picked up his cup and the plate with the very sad offering of liquified egg and made his way back inside of the bookshop.

The washing machine was currently in motion, spinning around a thick white bundle what Crowley ironically surmised to be the very bedsheets he had only just dragged himself out of. He located his work uniform; washed, dried and neatly folded upon the laundry bench and managed to leverage it onto the bridge of the arm what was holding the coffee cup.

He made his way back into the shop proper and happened across Aziraphale, in the midst of propping up the capsized display table. The angel near about dropped it in response to Crowley's reappearance.

"Oh..."He stuttered, easing the table up onto its stout little legs before standing alongside it with all the austerity of a feudal retainer. "Is, uh... is everything all right?"

"Staffing issue," Crowley grunted, gesturing with the arm what was currently draped in his work uniform. "One of the early starters can't get there until a little later and they need someone to cover."

Aziraphale looked offensively relieved by the news. "Oh. So, you're... heading in?"

"Well don't look too pleased about it," Crowley said, glancing over at the pile on books on which their illicit dalliances had been conducted. Having caught sight of something amidst the disarray, he of course took enormous delight in pointing it out to a still skittish angel. "Huh, would ya look at that. There's the _Kama Sutra,_ right there. How's that for irony?" He said, with a satisfied laugh.

Aziraphale's first response was to look even more embarrassed than he had two seconds earlier. The expression that followed was particularly interesting, and suggested that the _Kama Sutra_ of which Crowley had referenced, may in fact have been a First Edition and, as such, of particular value to the antiquarian book enthusiast. Value which was rapidly and definitively dwindling for every second it remained there, soaking in the accumulative fluids dispensed by means of their spontaneous union.

"Oh, yes. There it is." Aziraphale gave a stilted laugh, which sounded much more like a gastric hiccup. Crowley was surprised the angel managed to resist from throwing himself onto the bundle of books and scraping at their surfaces with the blunt end of a sterilized spatula.

He turned in a circle, giving a low whistle as he surveyed the mess. "Hoo boy... we really went for broke, huh?" He couldn't help but flash the angel a wink. Hey, just because he was being patient, didn't mean he couldn't have some fun at the same time. "Don't envy you much. Cleaning all this up."

Aziraphale, as to be expected, tittered nervously. "It... shouldn't take long. I'll make a proper start once you've headed off."

"Do I look like I'm worrying?" Crowley started limping his way between the shelves, eyes sweeping from side to side as he went. Aziraphale's own gaze followed; somewhat suspiciously.

"What are you looking for?"

"Just need my... ah, here it is." Crowley leaned down, scooping up his watch from just offside of one of the shelves. The screen was cracked, but easily repaired with but a quick snap of the fingers. He slipped it into the same pocket in which his phone was currently enjoying sovereignty and then wended his way back towards the bedsit. "Just gonna take a quick shower." He gave Aziraphale a meaningful look, setting the tip of his tongue into the corner of his smirking lips. "I'd, uh... ask you to join me... but we all know how that turned out last time."

Aziraphale once more went to every concerted effort so as to not discorporate on the spot.

"I've already taken one, thank you." He watched as Crowley made his way towards the kitchen, trying not to feel too offended by the demon's obvious refusal so as to partake of the egg he had spent the better part of three seconds poaching. "I'll make you a sandwich. If you think you might be able to stomach it."

"Don't get grouchy. Stomach was just a little more squirrely than I was anticipating." Crowley lied, setting the plate down on the kitchen counter and placing his empty coffee cup in the sink. "Wouldn't go worrying 'bout lunch. Probably won't be there past eleven. We can do something when I get back. Maybe miracle up a table for two at the Ritz, eh?"

Aziraphale smiled uncertainly, and Crowley resisted the urge so as to hurl the undercooked egg directly into his face. "Right. Maybe." He said, dithering his fingertips over the edge of his cardigan. His eyes looked a little glazed, much as they had done when Crowley had told him about the destruction of his bookshop the previous year, and it struck a cord in the demon's heart for seeing it.

He looked... lost.

It made Crowley's chest hurt. He didn't want Aziraphale to feel lost. He wanted him to feel happy, blissful and yes, maybe a little embarrassed about how wild things had gotten. But not standing there with a look what would not have been out of place if perched upon the face of a war victim.

Crowley took his shower. He wanted to enjoy it more, for the memories he now ascribed to the shower bay were intensely erotic ones.

He thought back on what he and Aziraphale had done the previous night. He stared at the wall; the very same one he had been sliding up and down on only hours earlier. His back still felt a little raw from where it had been rubbing against the tiles.

He remembered the sublime depth of Aziraphale's thrusts... the way his eyes had roamed across his body as he had so shamelessly displayed himself. Putting himself into the very position Aziraphale had demanded of him.

 _Giving you that trust. Giving myself_ over _to you._

A very different look, to that which he was currently showcasing.

Crowley dressed, quietly relieved that it was his baggy work uniform into which he was squeezing his still very sore lower half. The idea of wriggling his tender arse into the tight leather of his pants was not at all an appealing one.

He styled his hair, slipped on his shoes (a more appropriate, and suitable set of slip-on's) and pushed his glasses up over the bridge of his nose.

"I'll be off," He said, passing back through the centre of the store, fiddling with his watch as he went. Aziraphale, in the midst of plucking books up off of the floor, near about shucked his back in two in his haste to snap himself upright.

"Yes. Right."

Crowley waved a hand at him. "Come over here and give me a hand with this blasted headache, would you? Won't be much use to anyone in this state."

"Oh. Of course." Aziraphale made his way over, his eyes moving from one direction to the next, and placed his hands to either side of Crowley's temples. He pushed magic down through his fingers; little difference to what he had done the previous night when lubricating Crowley in preparation for entering him.

The demon gave him a long, lingering look. Appealing to the angel to meet his gaze in return.

"You're not going to spend all day freaking out about what happened last night, are you?"

Aziraphale gave the sort of nervous chuckle which suggested that this was precisely what he had planned for the day ahead. "Freaking out? No, no why - why would I be... freaking out?"

"You know we didn't do anything wrong," Crowley said. He tried to keep the emotion out of his tone, but it wasn't easy. "Was always going to happen. One way or another."

"I know."

"Right," Crowley said. He wasn't convinced, but he wasn't going to add to it by bringing additional pressure to bear. "Give us a kiss then."

He leaned in and Aziraphale thankfully obliged him by stretching up on his tiptoes to grant him a kiss. He didn't touch his face, or grasp his neck or extend any of the other intimacies he had gotten in the habit of doing the past few weeks. But it was better than nothing.

 _A few hours,_ Crowley reasoned, _and he'll have his head screwed on straight._

"Should be back a little before twelve," He advised, passing his lips over so as to place a peck to Aziraphale's cheek. He managed to locate his keys, from where they had been unceremoniously dumped upon the angel's study desk and spun them about his finger as he made his way to the door. "Try and not spend the whole day wigging out."

Aziraphale managed to maintain a grip on his increasingly trembly smile as Crowley sauntered his way out the door. At the sound of the lock clicking back into place, he surrendered what menial pretence of calm he had been ineffectively bandying and gave himself over to the feelings what were rising ever higher in him by the moment.

The mess in the bookshop was a simple thing to fix. It could not at all compare to the disarray what currently held court, in Aziraphale's soul.

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 6:40am~** _   
_**Theresa's Hall - Belgravia London...** _

It was early morning. Humanitas sat at the kitchen counter, a cup of tea within easy reach and the novel he had borrowed from Aziraphale resting upon the crook of his knee. He had read the words many a thousand times already, but they never seemed more the poignant and more the meaningful than they did in that very moment.

A tall figure passed through the open doorway; passing under the dim light thrown by the hanging bulbs Humanitas had seen fit to illuminate.

Industria looked tired, though sleep was of course something of which their kind had no need. Her hair, always so impeccably groomed at the days start, was as dishevelled as it was by days close. Her clothes were dark and heavy with stains and spatters; some as large as dinner plates, others as small as raindrops.

"Industria!" Humanitas convivially greeted, closing his book and setting it upon the countertop. "I wasn't aware you had arrived!"

"Got in late last night," said the virtue of diligence, taking from one of her many pockets one of her equally as innumerable cloths and using it to cleanse the circumference of her brow. Humanitas, in the midst of rising and poised ready so as to offer her the standard, charitable embrace, hesitated.

"I see you've already been busy," He observed, having taken notice of the state in which she had presented herself. He appeared about as shocked by their appearance, as a farmer is shocked by lifting a hen and finding an egg perched underneath. "No surprises there." He gestured to the teapot. "Care for a cup?"

"Cheers, babes."

Humanitas took one of the delicate cups he had set nearby on the likely chance of him receiving company. Whilst he poured the tea, Industria took the opportunity to wash her hands beneath the warm water of the kitchen sink. She soaped, cleaned thoroughly between each finger, and used a hard bristled brush to disinter the unsightly muck from beneath each nail.

Having amended quite as much as she was able, she installed herself opposite her fellow Virtue. Added a dash of milk to her tea, and about four loaded teaspoons of sugar. Perhaps she might have added honey as well, if there had been any on offer.

"You're up early," She said, her tone one of approval. Early starters were habitually hard workers, after all. "Still not sleeping?"

Humanitas took a sip, and set the cup down delicately in its equally elegant saucer. It made not so much as a muffled 'clink', though the mansion was near silent enough so as to ring the resonance clearly throughout its winding, cavernous halls.

"My dear diligence," He said. "In this day and age, kindness is a state which cannot afford to sleep. You know that as well as I do."

"Bloody oath," She agreed, taking an apple from the bowl what was set nearby and placing one of its ripe, red edges between her lips. She ripped away at the supple meat, swilled the juice about between her immaculate teeth. "Seems like this piece of fruit on which we're dancin' is gettin' more and more rotten by the day."

"I saw Humilitas earlier. He was heading out with Castitas and Patientia for a jog." Humanitas pursed his lips, looking every bit as though he had unhappily chanced upon the lemon what was floating upon the surface of his tea. "I would never say it to the dear fellow, but he looks absolutely dreadful."

Industria shrugged, her cheek about as full as she could possibly manage whilst still being capable of conversation. "Makes sense. Humility is the trait what is diminishing most quickly in the human condition."

"Superbia looks positively smashing by comparison. Hard to know if that's simply on account of the oversaturation of pride, or the-" Humanitas set his fingertips against his face, pushing against his jowls so that they perched higher than gravity saw fit to allow. "-cheek fillers."

"Why not both?" Industria suggested, and they smiled softly at the inference. "How are _you_ holding up these days?" She asked, taking another sip from the tea. She added another spoonful of sugar as an afterthought. Coffee was her preferred morning imbuement, but the tea itself was somewhat soothing. She needed soothing. Much of it, in fact.

"There's still kindness enough to see me through. If ever in doubt, I simply log onto the internet and look up YouTube videos." Humanitas's eyes twinkled softly with mirth. "'Random acts of kindness' is an especially popular search function. Right up there alongside cute kitten videos and makeup tutorials. The world, it seems, still holds a special place for kindness."

"But not humility."

"It would seem not."

They were silent a moment, absorbing the reality that very much separated them from that which was enjoyed by the Vices. The balance of the human condition had always been their primary mission on earth, but that path was a two way street. What was sent out, was fed back. When the channel was starved, so too was the source from which it stemmed.

And in this modern world, it was the delicious Vices what were so much more enjoyed, than the delayed gratification supposed by the Virtues.

"How is Invidia?" Industria asked, trying her utmost not to think of the crows feet what had adhered themselves to the corners of her eyes. The sinking of her cheeks, and the lines what had become a permanent feature of her brows. Often times she would look at them in the mirror and feel as though someone had installed floating shelves upon her face. Shelves upon which any number of hardships, troubles and consternations had been perched, for all the world to see.

"Having a lie in." Humanitas chuckled, teacup poised just offside of his thick, silver flecked moustache. "It's ironic, is it not? That old saying. "No rest for the wicked". For all I know of Vices is for how much time they do in fact have in which to rest."

"The little pricks are well nourished by the wickedness of the human condition," Industria said with a smirk. "Remember when once upon a time, we were the ones with the clean faces, the smooth skin and the tight little arses?" She glanced her hand off of her own broad backside in evidence of the statement. Not as bad as it could have been, but she'd never had so much as a spot of cellulite until about two hundred years ago. Acedia, on the other hand; all their gross, pimple flecked, grimy oddities aside, had an arse you could bounce a quarter off of. Hardly seemed fair.

Humanitas's cheeks dimpled softly in evidence of his amusement. "I don't know about you, my dear, but I can safely say that my arse was never what you might describe as 'tight' nor little." He gestured towards her with his cup. The lemon inside pushed lightly against the delicately painted carnation what was glazed into its interior. "Just so as to jump all over the elephant in the room..."

Industria pinched out her singlet; paying tribute to one particularly large stain what had adhered itself to the surface.

"Oh, this?" She said, with the sort of careless sigh a human could never have hoped to affect. For there was of course detachment, and then there was the lack of attachment, altogether. "Just more work for me to do. As usual."

"Is it the-?"

"Ya." Industria said, leaning her back against the far countertop and taking one last bite of the apple what reduced it to its core.

"I thought something must have been awry," Humanitas passed his teacup in a small semicircle about the room. "I hadn't seen it making its' rounds during the night."

Something he had been for the most part relieved about. He was uncomfortable about it, such as he had always been and much preferred having the quiet in which to read and observe his inner peace. There was to be precious little of such moments in the coming months. Mores the reason for it to be observed without the need to block out the desolate keening nickers of the pitiful creature as it cracked and crackled its way about the halls with all the comfort of a brackish scarecrow brought to life.

"It's been trying to tear itself apart, again."

Humanitas winced. "Oh dear."

"I ran a CT scan. It looks like its subcortical pathways are beginning to regenerate."

"Dualistically?" Humanitas set his cup down as Industria nodded. Intrigued, in spite of his own distaste. "How peculiar. You... don't suppose that they...?"

"Anything is possible when one is prepared to go to the effort of achieving it." Industria said, sounding all too much like one of those inspirational memes for which she was very much and proudly responsible for. "And the more desperate the instinctive drive, the harder the push." She opened up the drawer beneath the sink, dropped the apple core into the compost bin and returned to her tea. "Had to open them up; introduce a trauma to the prosencephalon. It's docile enough now, but that's not the half of the shit I gotta sort out."

"Yes?"

"The virtuous component is givin' up the ghost. It's no longer producin' platelets, or cerebrospinal fluid. I had to manually drain the toxins. You can't even imagine the fight it put up." She sipped her tea, almost then spurting it from her nostrils as her thoughts drove her to continue the conversation without pause. "Oh, OH! AND, get _this!_ The Vile component... has got gangrene... of the _wing!"_ She scoffed, pulling a face at Humanitas what plainly encouraged him to share in her disbelief. He, on the other hand, perceived an opening in which to offer his truer most assertions on the matter.

"My dear," He murmured, using his spoon so as to carefully imbue the lemon into the essence of the tea. He was a sweet creature, but he was not, however, opposed to a small state of sourness where necessary. "Not to second guess your considerable accomplishments, but perhaps this is a sign that it is time to let the pitiful creature go?"

Industria gave a vehement shake of her head, loosing further strands of hair from the once tightly knotted chunks of her braid. Humanitas rather poetically fancied that it was far the more than hair what was shaking loose in that very moment.

"I can't do that."

"What benefit is there in keeping it alive? Or, rather... in whatever you might call the state in which it exists? Acedia has more than enough protection. We are all living under the same roof, after all."

"Everyone has duties of their own to be getting on with. We can't be 'ere all the time. _I_ can't be here all the time. Besides..." Industria sipped from her tea, her expression unchanged. Unswayed. "Acedia is more at risk of killing themselves than they are of being killed by anyone else. I can't take the risk of leaving them unattended. Besides," She curled one shoulder, smiling in a fashion what Humanitas considered to be more than a little unnerving. A revenant of times long past, and of a world that was distant and cold and void of sentimentality. "I'm fond of it."

"You have a unique way of showing fondness, my dear diligence." Humanitas said, and Industria could not pretend as though she did not sense the cool shift in his tone. It was subtle, for that was quite as much as what kindness was capable, but it was there all the same. And she was certain she did not care for it.

"Isn't that a little judgy for kindness's sake?" She posited, believing her challenge would be enough so as to put him in his place. She was an alpha of their kind, after all, and theirs was an energy what was rarely disputed.

"I have never hidden from you the fact that I find the entire affair distasteful," Humanitas said, his expression controlled and centred. He was not concerned by the shift in her tone, and there was a sound reason behind it. One of which they were both aware. "You saw my reaction firsthand when you started putting it into effect back in the nineteen-forties."

Industria jabbed a finger towards the ceiling. _"She_ never made a peep about it," She said, as though this in and of itself served as suitable defence for her actions.

"She never does." Humanitas said, setting down his teacup, placing his fingers together and setting them down upon the closed cover of his novel. His point made, he stared congenially up at Industria; her rapt attendant once more. "So; what will you do?"

"I need samples," Industria said, quietly relieved for the shift in their conversation. It was always a little disarming when Humanitas modestly sought to remind her of things they had all done their very best to either ignore, or to push to the side. "From an angelic host."

"Little hard to come across."

Industria responded to this in the form of a slow, lingering look; her eyes then dropping down so as to land upon the book on which Humanitas's hands rested. The penny dropped, with a hard resonance that bellowed in the pit of the Virtue's stomach.

"Oh." He said.

"I was planning on washing up and heading out there now." Industria advised, draining the last few drops from her cup; tilting her head back unnecessarily so as to make certain nothing was wasted.

"My dear, surely there is another way," Humanitas murmured. If his heart were required to beat, it would be pounding a million miles a minute.

_Not Aziraphale. No. No, no, no, no! My dear, old friend... Not him!_

_An innocent and sweet thing..._

_And Crowley. Poor Crowley... oh, it would break his heart._

_They were undeserving, the both of them. Placed on this earth to facilitate the balances of Heaven and Hell; pointless and offensive and meaningless. Why should this be the end result for them? They had served as ballast long enough. They deserve more than that._

_They deserved some_ meaning.

"Mate, don't even start in on me about your precious pet principality," Industria said, pointing a finger at him as she crossed to the sink. As no nonsense as a high school maths teacher right before the bell rang for lunch. "He'll be gone in a couple of months, anyway. Least he'll be of some use in the meantime."

She rinsed and washed her cup, taking the tea towel what was looped about the oven handles and drying the vessel before then placing it back into the cabinet from which Humanitas had originally fetched it. Humanitas's fingers grazed over the embroidered cover of the First Edition he had loaned from Aziraphale; his thoughts racing and each worth more than even the most antiquated of pennies.

"I'm gonna go take a splash," Industria was saying, turning to make her way out of the room and Humanitas found himself standing, one stray thought finding point of purchase in his mind and formulating itself into hard reality.

_Anyone but him._

_Anyone._

"Allow me to do it," He said. A desperate offer, but one that would give him more time. Time in which to figure out just what it was he was doing to do.

Industria turned, offering up a sardonic smile as she leant her large, calloused hand against the doorframe.

"Humanitas, you know I fuckin' love ya, son, but this is a little outside of your comfort zone. You can't even flick an ant off of a biscuit."

"You are my sister," He said, which was as true a thing to remind her of as any. And a little manipulative, if he was also being honest with himself. But what else could he do? "If you had need of it, I would crush an ant beneath my thumb. You know that I am capable."

He needn't say anything the more definitive than this. They were both aware of what he was capable. They had both seen first hand what it was he had done at the Lord's behest in Ancient Egypt. Ants were far the least of what he was capable of crushing.

"I will deliver the principality. He trusts me. It would cause less of a disturbance." Humanitas raised both aged hands in an appeal for understanding. Wove deeper the threads what gave form to the pattern of his deception. "And permit me to make some peace with the matter. I owe him that much." He tilted his head, going for the metaphorical kill shot. "Surely, I am entitled to that much kindness?"

Industria groaned, rendered helpless by the well meaning nature of Humanitas's entreaty. "Yeah, all right," She grumbled, flapping one of her burnished palms at him. The fact that she was so worn out and so filthy was likely one of the contributory factors what had swung the odds in Humanitas's favour. "You get _one_ shot, though. Come back empty handed and I'll be marchin' straight on out that door to get shit done myself." Her brows furrowed purposefully. "And I'm not the one with a kind bone in my body."

"I understand," Humanitas said, easing both hands into the small of his back and dropping his head in a slight, respectful bow. He remained as such, until Industria had drifted in the direction of the stairwell, making her way towards the room what she now shared with Acedia.

Humanitas remained as such for some time. So long in fact, that bones locked in his ancient back; causing aches in his sciatic nerve to ricochet down into his legs. To prickle at his toes.

He did not know what it was he was going to do.

What he did know, was that one way or another, come Hell or high water, he would be returning to Theresa's Hall that day with an angel in tow.

And where he was supposed to find one; one who was not one of this oldest and most dearest of friends, he had no earthly idea.

For not the first time in so many thousands of years, he beseeched the Lord God for some advice on the matter. He was disappointed, though unsurprised to find Her, much as she had always been, without much to say.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thanks for reading guys! Hope that you enjoyed! In the next chapter, Gabriel and Beelzebub pay a visit to the bookstore. Because bothering a very bent out of shape Aziraphale is PRECISELY what you want to be doing with your life. Fingers crossed it will be out by next Sunday, but just to be on the safe side, I'm going to shoot for the following Sunday, instead. That way, it'll hopefully be a nice surprise if I manage to peck it out early!
> 
> Here's hoping you have a wonderful day in whatever part of the world you find yourselves! I'm off for a celebratory glass of red wine now. Don't forget that if you want to keep up to date with updates, I have a silly little twitter that I post bullshit to daily. You can find me at @madammortis.
> 
> As always and with all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	57. Or, in which burst fire hydrants feel like a terrible cliche.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hi everybody! I know that it's been a while, and I'm sorry for that. Even before all of this awful COVID-19 awfulness, I was taking a break so as to get some of my mojo back and now with everything else going on, I've had much less time than usual to write. I'm an essential worker and still working five days a week, with my husband (who works in a restaurant) naturally being stood down temporarily.
> 
> I know everyone is in the same boat, so I hope that a new chapter might provide a temporary distraction from all the shit going on out there at the moment. I hope you are all keeping safe and healthy. Times are tough, but there will be an end to this. As long as we are doing the right thing by self-isolating, practicing that wonderful social distancing and limiting our outings to those that would be considered essential.
> 
> With that in mind, my posting schedule is going to change. Whenever I have a new chapter completed, I am going to edit it and post it. I won't be waiting around to post on particular days. If I have something I can share with you guys, I'm going to get it out to you as soon as it's ready.
> 
> This chapter is a little shorter (I think?) than the others, but I felt it reached a good stopping point. I'll be working on chapter 58 right away, and I'll try and keep you guys updated on my Twitter account if you're interested @ Madammortis.
> 
> As usual, thank you to everyone who read, commented, bookmarked and kudoed since the last chapter. It's always incredibly appreciated, and I am very grateful to all of you for taking time out to spend with this little story of mine :) 
> 
> Stay safe and healthy my darlings! Sending you all my love and supportive foot fives!

**~X~**

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 7:45am~** _   
_**Theresa's Hall - Belgravia London...** _

_**Nine months to the apex...** _

"You could have waited until I'd taken a shower," Humilitas said; finding himself at last capable of catching his breath.

He lay on his back alongside Superbia, on the luxurious bed they were sharing. Their assigned room was located on the top floor of Theresa's Hall; designed as such so that if one were to step out of the doorway, they could look out over the mansions entryway. Any opportunity for Superbia to look down upon others, either metaphorical or otherwise, was a given.

It was one of the better rooms, naturally. No one considered it time well spent arguing the rub with Superbia over whether he deserved it or not. (More the likely, not). They much preferred the peace what came part and parcel with the haughty Vice getting his way; one of the few there who would have considered such a thing as room assignment a thing of definitive importance. Bad enough he had been sentenced to see out the end of days in this garish abomination of gold and crimson _bagatelle,_ but to then be sequestered to a sub-standard room with a poky ensuite, plastic flower arrangements and twin beds each questionably crowned by pink velvet headboards from Kmart? Absolutely out of the bleeding question.

No, if Superbia was forced to see out his final days on earth in the garish abomination that was Theresa's Hall, he would at least do so in the state of luxury to which he was accustomed. Or, as close as he could get. It was hardly the Palace of Versailles, after all.

The bed upon which they were recumbent was indeed a splendid thing; a king sized canopy carved from dark mahogany, encircled by white cotton curtains and draped in the finest of imported linens. Linens what were currently so mussed, tangled and sweaty they might very well have been reefed from the laundry hamper of the Marquis de Sade. The bottom sheet was a particularly sorry affair; plucked clear of the mattress corners and decidedly dimpled from where fists had tightly clenched into the waiting grip of it. Clutches hard enough to send a strain down through wrists and fingertips alike. They would need to be washed, but that was where the Virtue of Diligence came in ever so handy. Industria liked having things to do. Even if said things were soaking and scrubbing the messed bed linen of her contemporaries.

Humilitas had entered the room with every intention of passing on through to the ensuite so as to shower after his morning jog. Superbia had put a swift halt to that line of thinking. He'd only just woken, but he had woken hungry and it was an appetite that would not be quelled by the insufficient likes of a Continental breakfast.

Humilitas often wished he had stronger convictions when it came to his secondary. Superbia was not always pleasant, or considerate to him. He was certainly not loyal in so far as his body was concerned. Humilitas could not always pretend that this very thought didn't occupy his mind whenever they came together; the fact that the body what was so pliant and diaphanous beneath his own had in fact been touched, and sucked, kissed and fucked by countless others.

It made every moan that he pushed from the Vice's throat seem more the insincere. Surely the lustre should have come off by now. Six thousand years of having sex would leave little in the way of what was new and arousing and enjoyable. He wasn't at all sure why Superbia went to the effort of chasing him for it. He couldn't have brought anything especially enjoyable or novel to the table; though he was, predominantly by way of his own insecurities, an efficient, thorough and enthusiastic lover.

Perhaps it should not have been so surprising. Their kind did possess extremely high sex drives. One of the means intended to strengthen the bond between them; that constant urge to come together, share in the mutual pleasure derived from the release of physical hormones, the bridging of the souls.

It was the reminder what drove the urges, what strengthened them. What made them thirst for a satiation that could only be quenched by way of their secondary's.

Humilitas understood this much. It was the fact that Superbia stuck around to chat afterwards, what so often took him by surprise.

The Vice of Pride did look extremely content. And very beautiful. It was never much of a mystery to Humilitas as to why he continually surrendered to him. Superbia had the typically near-perfect human body what producers from Hollywood would have likely fawned over if the Vice had considered them worthy of having seen it. Which he, of course, would not.

Even the toxins and fillers he injected into his face, all to achieve that very particular look of which he was attempting to emulate, did not look as confronting as they had those few days ago when Humilitas had first seen him after so many years apart.

The form continued to change. Nothing changed in so far as Humilitas's desire for Superbia. The Vice was entitled, and haughty and predominantly self-absorbed, but these were far from deterrents. Humilitas sometimes wished he could be strong enough to hold his secondary to account on those things what rubbed him up the wrong way. But then Superbia would go and rub him up the _right_ way, and those previously held convictions would just go and fly right on out the window.

"Please," The Vice was saying, supine against the pillows as he dragged from a joint he had just finished rolling. He rather enjoyed human drugs, and was known to partake on a recreational basis. "I'm not Patientia. Besides... You always smell so good after you've been jogging." He rolled onto his hip so as to set a kiss to Humilitas's mouth. "Makes me forget what a pencil neck you are most of the time."

"Such praise. You might almost make me blush." The Virtue raised a hand as Superbia offered him the filter end of the blunt. He was not opposed to the occasional puff here and there, but unlike Superbia and Caritas, he held little fascination for mind altering substances. "No, thankyou."

Superbia sighed, rolling onto his back and casting an arm up over his head. He eased out smoke from his lungs, the fingertips of his free hand trailing across the gleaming lines of his neck. His eyes, brightest of arctic blue, were eased almost entirely shut.

"Ohhh... how is sex still this _good_ with you? I could never cum this hard with a human."

"I should be offended it surprises you," Humilitas said, smiling his eternally tolerant smile. It felt, however, a little more strained than usual. "We're bonded, after all."

"Even then. Six thousand years, hundreds of thousands of lovers; I take one look at you and all I can think about is getting your cock up my arse."

"Such a whimsical way with words." Humilitas reached for his drink bottle, popped the lid and took a deep gulp of what water remained. "You ought to compose a ballad. 'Though a thousand genitals have crossed my path, I think only of you, and your cock up my arse.'"

Superbia rolled his eyes, recognizing the Virtue's trademark special brand of sarcasm for precisely what it was.

"Always one to take offence, when all I mean to do is pay you a not so innocent compliment. I wouldn't make the effort for just anyone, you know." He dropped a quick kiss against Humilitas's narrow shoulder. It was always the same, whenever they made love. For a select half hour or so, Superbia would be the absolute epitome of tenderness; all a run off from the hormones what had been jettisoned from his brain during orgasm. Once it had steadied out, he would be back to his usual pompous, contrary self; preferring his own space and uncaring where Humilitas was, so long as it wasn't within breathing distance of him. Like a cat who could not have loved you more than those few precious moments you were filling its dinner bowl.

Humilitas reminded himself that he was being unfair. How else was the living epitome of Pride expected to behave? He could no more control his own sense of self than any of them. It was all part of the blueprint. Holding him to unreasonable standards was most certainly looking for reason's to take offense. After seven thousand years of the status quo, he would be the fool in expecting anything to suddenly change.

"You're right," He avowed, with a small, distracted smile. He once again wished that he could be more decent a chap than he actually was. That he was selfless enough so as to naturally want to protect Superbia from his own childish feelings and bad moods. "That was... ungracious of me."

The Vice, typically unconcerned with Humilitas's concession, rolled over so as to tap ash into the glass tray on the bedside table. Industria would not be pleased if she had known of him smoking indoors, but that's where her current little pet project came in handy. Kept her from poking about around corners, looking for something to attend to.

"You ever wonder if the others screw like us?" Superbia asked, being one to always ask the important questions. Humilitas scoffed a little, slipping his legs beneath the uppermost sheet of the bed and using it to cover himself.

"I try and not let myself get that bored, Su-tan."

Superbia chuckled knowingly. "Please. After what you just did, you can't pretend to be so virtuous. Your mind must wander at times."

"Well it wanders, sure. Usually not so far down that particularly dark and dismal little alley."

"And here I thought I was the proud one." Superbia drew in another deep lungful of smoke and held it there a while. Marijuana did not affect their kind the way that it did human being's, but instilled a deep sense of relaxation which did wonders for the mind and body. His preferred go to was blow, but it was not the sort of thing one divvied out following sex. Before sex, well... that was a different story. "Can't quite get my head around Industria and Acedia's deal... Acedia probably just lays there like a star fish and lets Industria do all the heavy lifting."

"Probably works for them." Humilitas said, feeling guilty for permitting himself a smile at the thought. He eased the blunt out from Superbia's fingers and took a small drag. Coughed, for he was not at all practiced with it. "I for one can't fathom entirely what the nature of Gula and Temperantia's arrangement is. Hard to imagine them going at it."

Superbia pulled a face and Humilitas tried not to let himself feel too pleased by the reaction. Even just getting along in conversation like this was... comforting, for him. "I for one try NOT to imagine it." The Vice took the blunt back and drew from the remaining stub. "Besides, you've heard Temperantia's lectures, haven't you? "Our bond is an arrangement. Anything more than that can put the relationship at risk. Affection can all too swiftly transmute into jealousy, jealous begets duty", blah-de-blah."

"Humanitas and Invidia, clearly did not get the memo." Humilitas said, thoughtfully. The fact that Superbia had spoken so flippantly of Temperantia's beliefs was interesting. It suggested, in part, that he did not entirely agree with keeping his emotions strictly separate from the overarching 'arrangement'. Which was not something Humilitas would have expected of him.

"How?" The Vice of Pride asked, with a teasing grin. "You watching through a gap in the curtains, ay?"

"Oh, please. Humanitas is hardly shy about it. You know that. It's about as close to bragging as a Virtue is capable, really."

"Ain't that the truth. Old blow-hard practically writes his declarations in the clouds." Superbia took another puff of the spliff, shifted in the bed and groaned. His lower half ached perfectly; something he had always doubted possible after more than sex thousand years of having sex. A fact he was pleased to as always be surprised by. "Everyone thinks you're so sweet," He said, with a soft chuckle at the images what then drifted into his mind. Re-imaginings of the minutes earlier, where Humilitas was pile driving into him so determinedly; so unabashed in his state of arousal. "Think it would probably blow their minds they knew you fucked like a porn star."

"Surprised you haven't told them." Humility murmured, an edge lending itself to his tone. An edge he may have been able to prevent, if he cared enough to filter his feelings. Un-virtue like, but also, irresistible. "Then again... there's a lot you don't feel it necessary to say."

He expected the usual impatient come-back of which the Vice was renowned. Superbia abhorred passive-aggressiveness above all else; preferring that someone own their feelings and 'say it like it was'. He had certainly taken exception to much less in the past.

Which was why it so surprised the Virtue to see Superbia sitting up in the bed, with an expression upon his face that he was not at all accustomed to seeing. A look of surprise, that seemed to soften the closer it got to the Vice's usually cold, and distant eyes.

"Is that what you think?" Superbia asked. The tone was not one of admonishment, but of genuine curiosity and, foreign as it was, concern. "That I'm ashamed of you?"

"You're not?"

"Of course not." Superbia said, continuing to astonish his secondary in just how sensitively he chose to deliver his words. "Just because I'm not fawning over you and throwing the L word around for all and sundry to hear does not mean that I don't think the aether of you."

He raised the hand what was not still pinched about the smouldering column of the blunt. Passed his fingers down Humilitas's cheek. The Virtue did what he could not to lean into the touch. He had made that mistake in the past. It had usually culminated with his toppling sideways onto the mattress, forced to watch with pinched, weeping eyes as Superbia swanned his way into the ensuite to shower; unconcerned as to whatever it was Humilitas now chose to occupy himself with.

This touch however, seemed different to all those millions what preceded it. Not a perfunctory extension of expected intimacies, but one which was possessed of much greater weight. The touch was supportive and inviting. And Superbia's gaze... He may have been conceited, and imperious but he was not, and never had been, a liar. He had great respect for the truth, in so far as he never felt the need, nor the compulsion to make excuses for his decisions. Lying was, to him, entirely unnecessary.

Humilitas knew this. He knew this and was crippled by it.

"What we share isn't anyone else's business but our own," Superbia was saying, his thumb grazing alongside of Humilitas's lips. Lips that the Virtue always supposed to be just a little too thin. Perhaps a physical facet which embarrassed Superbia, made him want and expect more for his secondary. "I can't pretend to understand your need for everyone to be privy to what goes on behind closed doors. You're supposed to be the humble one, yeah?"

Humilitas smiled. The corners of his mouth felt heavy; as though the weight of his cheeks were much greater than normal. "I would think you old fashioned and romantic if I didn't know you better."

"What would you prefer? That I play pretend? Tell you what you wanted to hear, do whatever it was you wanted me to do?" Superbia leaned away, leaving the side of Humilitas's face cool and tapped free more ash what was threatening to plop itself onto the bed sheets. "I would never disrespect you like that. Not like the others all playing their silly little mind fuck games."

"What do you mean 'mind games'?" The Virtue asked, momentarily distracted from his own concerns. It seemed an odd thing for Superbia to have brought up, even in such a seemingly offhand manner.

The Vice turned back to look at him, and smiled. "Oh." He appraised, running the backs of his fingers down along the nimble curve of Humilitas's chin. "It's moments like this that I remember just how innocent you are." He took the final, poignant draw from the spliff, before crushing it out in the ashtray like a cockroach he might have seen scurrying across an otherwise sterile kitchen counter. "Well... I haven't got any hard proof, but I'm pretty sure Avaritia is having it off with Luxuria."

"Two Vices?" Humilitas was astonished by the very thought. It was not unheard of for Vices and even Virtue's to engage in sexual 'relationships' (for lack of a better word) with humans. Predominantly so as to affluently blend into earthen society. But when it came to their own species, a Vice and a Virtue were holistically drawn towards their affiliate secondary; to the exception of all others. The very idea of a Vice and a Vice engaging with one another was little different to picking up two plugs and attempting to force them together. It just did not work. "From what evidence have you drawn this manner of conclusion?"

"Their energy." Superbia said, with a shrug. That sort of shrug which said, 'I do not know if I am 100% correct, but I have a gut feeling about it, that I am embarrassed to admit to'. "Not to mention I've run into them a couple of times through the centuries. Staying in the same place. Sans Castitas and Caritas. Should it really be so surprising?"

He rolled over onto his belly, pulling a pillow in against his chest, so that he could rest his cheek against it. Humilitas felt his eyes unconsciously drift down to admire the curves of the Vice's pale arse. Whatever form he had possessed throughout the centuries, Superbia had always managed to maintain that perfect balance with his backside. More to the side of soft and round, as opposed to hard and firm. Humilitas had remarked about it once when they had been in bed. It had been the first time that Superbia had opted for a more malleable rump and since then, he had kept his specifications very much in line with this.

Humilitas had not given it much thought. He did now. And felt very ignorant and insecure for not seeing the gesture for what it was.

"We're talking about lust and greed incarnate," Superbia was saying. He had foisted from somewhere a small hand mirror and had placed it on the mattress beside him. With a snap of his fingers, white powder appeared upon the surface. With a razor blade he had similarly pulled from the thin of the air, he took to cutting thin the line of blow. So much for not needing the stimulation. "You can't imagine Luxuria is getting what she needs from Castitas. This is the virgin prude what invented abstinence after all. And Avaritia -" He pinched a nostril shut, leaned in and sucked up the line he had cut. Took a moment to make good and certain he had gotten it down just right. "- he always wants what he's not supposed to have. Surprised he hasn't come after more of you, really."

"He would be wasting his time." Humilitas said, honestly. He waved a hand when Superbia held out the small mirror towards him. A generous gesture where the Vice was concerned, but not one that the Virtue was interested in it. It was the gesture itself what comforted him. The generosity. The inclusion. The affirmation of something singular, and special existing between them.

"Aren't you the loyal one?" Superbia remarked, with an ironic smile, slipping the mirror onto the bedside table.

"A trait that is entirely lost on you." Humilitas said, somewhat tartly as he took another sip from his water bottle. Superbia looked at him and his expression was not one that the Virtue had been in any way expecting. As though he was... genuinely shocked by Humilitas's remark.

"What? I would never cheat on you."

Humilitas choked back a laugh. "You've slept with just as many people as Luxuria. If not more."

And, more to the point, with less of a reason. What else was to be expected from the Vice of Lust? It was her duty to evoke and encourage the pleasures of the flesh. And hers was an appetite what was voracious; in constant need of satiation. Pride on the other hand... it was not a requirement. Superbia's base needs were not primarily linked to sex. Humilitas had always struggled to understand why he felt the need to bed quite so many people as he had. Whom was he trying to impress? What need was he trying to meet?

Why was Humilitas never enough for him?

"Those were humans, they don't count!" Superbia said, and he did in fact sound upset. Upset and... frustrated. "It's all just part of the game, part of the impression I have to maintain in this world. To feed into the pride. Humans equate so much pride with sexual prowess; what choice did I have but to constantly reinforce the mythos? What sort of enjoyment is there in duty?" He snapped a cigarette in-between his fingers out of nowhere, lit the tip and sucked quickly and needfully upon the filter. Humilitas thought it a strangely vulnerable gesture; the likes of which he had ever so rarely witnessed. "My heart was never in it. I was never submissive to a single one of them. Not like I am with you. You're the only one I've ever let put their cock in me."

He glanced over now, for Humilitas was silent; void of the usual snappy comeback and staring down at the uppermost sheet what draped his lap. His black hair hung about to either side of his face like curtains abridge a maudlin middle school play. Lips pressed together, he seemed to have not a wit of an idea as to what it was he was supposed to think.

"You didn't know that." Superbia surmised. Finding himself just as surprised by his secondary's reaction. Had he never made him aware of such things? He was quite certain he had at least alluded to it during particularly intimate moments. And proud as he may have been, he was most certainly far from a fibber.

"I didn't." Humilitas admitted, feeling those emotions what they had so capably recreated in the human condition, welling up inside of him. How very helpless it made a body feel. Curse the aether for it. "I'm not quite sure what to say."

Superbia issued his traditional, annoyed sounding groan towards the ceiling. "Not everything _needs_ to be said! Why should you have a doubt in your stupid head as to just what it is you mean to me? No one is more important in all the universe than you! No one has _ever_ been more important than you, you bloody putz!" He tapped ash into the ashtray, tutted and rolled his eyes. It always felt so pointless, these remonstrations. Why Humilitas had need of these constant reassurances, he didn't know. Did humility simply go hand in hand with insecurity these days? "Now the game is done, so is my duty. No more tomcatting about for me."

"I can't deny that I'm relieved to hear it." Humilitas confessed. A little of the ache had gone out of his chest; an ache he had nursed inside of himself for thousands of years now. An ache what had for so long been a part of himself, he hadn't even known it was there.

"You shouldn't need to hear everything to know that it's true." Superbia said, with a small frown. "Where's the trust?"

"I do trust you. Perhaps that is part of the problem. I trust in what I see." Humilitas glanced out from behind the wave of hair what curtained the side of his face. He had incredibly soft eyes, the Virtue. A shade of hazel what could more accurately be described by way of emotion, rather than colour. A delicate sheen was glazed across the surface of them; what might have been the preface of tears. "You always act as though you don't care. As though you don't even... like me."

"Don't be so insecure," Superbia murmured, leaning over to press a kiss once more against the Virtue's shoulder before resting his cheek against the bridge of his arm. It really was exhausting dancing attendance on a Virtue's rampant insecurities all the time. How Humanitas kept on top of Invidia's near possessive and paranoid ruminations he didn't know.

"I really hope that you're wrong about Luxuria and Avaritia," Humilitas' brows dipped to either side of his olive shaped eyes, deep lines appearing in the hillock what formed above his nose. "Poor Caritas. How could they live with themselves, knowing they're making a fool out of the Mahatma Gandhi of Principal Virtues?"

"He is a darling. For his sake, I hope I've read the whole thing wrong. It's been known to happen." Superbia took another drag from his cigarette before once again offering it to his secondary. Humilitas waved it away, his mind more the focused on other matters.

"Su-tan? What do you suppose is going to happen? After, I mean?"

Superbia thought on this a moment, and by his estimates, that was one moment too many. "A bleak business. After." He tapped ash distractedly towards the ash tray. A few flakes splintered free and drifted over the edge of the mattress, towards the plush carpet below. "I suppose we go back to the way things were."

"It seems a shame," Humilitas said, with the sort of self-conscious smile he felt would have been appropriate to have been chastised for. He was always far too obvious in his manipulations; such as was to be expected of a Virtue. "I like the way things are now. I like 'us' as we are. You being you, me being me. You know?"

For a moment, Humilitas was certain he was about to get put firmly back in his place. Superbia had already shown that he was not a fan of the speculation; believing that it put the both of them at risk if they were to start openly questioning things. As such, the Virtue was once more intrigued to see a look of what he took to be regret making the unfamiliar trek across the path of Superbia's face. It was not an emotion with which the Vice had a great deal of experience, and as such it stood out like a pregnant pole vaulter.

"I have to admit... going back to the way things were... it does my head in a bit."

Humilitas twisted over on his hip; like a fishermen having felt that first distinctive nip at the hook he had long since cast out into the water. If ever there was an opportunity to hobble Superbia's convictions on the matter, this was it.

"Have you given anymore thought to...?"

The Vice's finger came up smartly off of the cigarette filter, and directed itself about so as to point at Humilitas' nose. The tentatively indulged look of grief had been punitively sluiced out of the corners of the Superbia's face at the Virtue's passive entreaty.

"Don't start this again, babe."

"We're not helpless in all this," Humilitas insisted, ignoring Superbia's reproach. It was a conversation what needed having; fear and duty be damned. "We're not much less powerful than She is. If we all stood as a united front-"

"- it would only make it easier for her to smite us in one fell swoop." Superbia squished out the cigarette in the ash tray symbolically, reaching then for a small tub of very expensive, gold leaf flecked moisturizer and using but a tiny dab to rub between his fingers and palms. Humilitas eased back against the pillows they had set against the headboard, casting his eyes towards the marble ceiling with a sigh.

"Your attitude surprises me. You've always been so fearless."

"You're the fearless one. The selfish one. If the price of us standing up to God is potentially losing you, I won't pay it." Superbia rolled over suddenly, placing his freshly moisturized hand against the column of Humilitas's slender neck. His fingers traced the thick scars what coursed the length of them; scars wrought by way of the human races voracious indulgence of vanity, self-interest and selfishness. As though the world were slowly attempting to shear the Virtue's head from his shoulders with a cordon of barbed wire.

Superbia felt the cover ease itself free of the well inside of him, and fear burbled up like water set to the boil. They had a duty to perform, and theirs was a mission what was indisputably noble and important. So much rested on their work here. The needs and feelings of the Vices and the Virtue's were so inconsequential by comparison, that it would be an insult to suggest they possessed any sort of merit at all. They had been assigned because of their professionalism and practicality. Their lack of sentimentality, their loyalty to the greater cause, their drive to do whatever was required to get the results they all so desperately needed.

This however, was the projected and expected end result of Submersion. Practical, they may very well have been, but the Vices and Virtue's were not made of stone. How could they have lived for so long in this world, amongst its people and its changing times, without being affected by it? Time itself was a hand firm enough so as to shape the softening edges of their preternatural spirits.

Gula and Temperantia may have succeeded in maintaining a strictly professional and emotion free arrangement, but the same could not be said for the rest of them.

"This world... it's killing you," Superbia said, his voice breaking. They had both forgotten at just what point it was that they had so casually started to refer to one another in distinctive tense. 'You' instead of 'we'. 'Your' instead of 'our'. "Slowly, but surely. You can't go on this way, not with the way things are."

"My lessening makes you stronger," Humilitas softly murmured, rubbing his thumb over the back of the Vice's hand. The pale flesh what was firm, springy, moisturized and well hydrated. The body what was free of scars, lines, damage and aging. Only part of which, was as a result of his enthusiasm for plastic surgery. "You know that."

"I don't want it. Things are completely out of balance." Superbia's eyes blazed fiercely; a heat somehow rising up out of the cold blue of them. Like oil burning upon the surface of the ocean. "I won't see this world devour you. For your sake, for all the Virtue's sake, it has to end."

Humilitas lips rolled over on themselves, such that they appeared to have vanished into his mouth entirely. He sat up, head lowered and eased the heel of his hand into the corner of each welling eye. His shoulders gave a few, preliminary bucks; aftershocks from the sobs what were currently heaving out from his chest.

"What?" Superbia asked, taken aback. "What did I say?"

 _Far the more than you realized,_ Humilitas thought, not yet able to speak. _The reason you want to complete this mission is not that you believe it is your divine duty to do so. Not even out of fear of God's reprisal, never the mind what the Aether might do. You want to reach the Apex because you can see that I am suffering, and the suffering is painful for you._

"All these thousands of years, spent in doubt..." Humilitas murmured, giving a soft, self-mocking laugh as he wiped tears from beneath each eye. The irony was impossible to ignore. "Only now, at the end of all things do I find out that you truly love me."

"All right, don't let it go to your head." Superbia said, turning his face away in a gesture that was somehow both haughty and bashful at the same time. Embarrassment was an emotion that was so distinctly out of place when it came to the Vice of Pride, that Humilitas could not help but laugh to see it.

"Why, as I live and breathe; your face has gone red! I never knew it was capable of such a thing!"

"Clear off, you know perfectly well it goes red during sex." Superbia protested, uncertain as to what to do now the balance of power had shifted. He wasn't sure how to cope with the teasing, and was irritated to find that it was causing his cheeks to redden more by the minute. "And I never said anything at all about loving you. You're a distinctly unlikeable creature, who I simply have the misfortune of being saddled with for the rest of eternity. Like some sick cosmic joke, this is. Always has been. Martyr's would pity my lot."

"Uh-huh."

"You're a terrible bore. You have no fashion sense, your hair's too long, your forehead's too high, nobody likes you, frankly you're an embarrassment to be seen with. You have the personality of a plastic fiscus. I honestly don't know why I put up with you."

"Because you love me," Humilitas said, smiling as he leaned down to place a kiss against Superbia's forehead. A smile what quickly turned teasing as he glanced his fingertip over the Vice's deftly stylized lips. "And because I could suck a golf ball down the length of a garden hose."

"I suppose you have _some_ good qualities." Superbia conceded, parting his lips for the Virtue's kiss. He held him close a moment, one arm tight about the narrow shoulders before then raising his knee and pushing against Humilitas' sternum. "Don't go getting all frisky; I'm not having sex with you again. I'm too fucking tired."

"Ah, yes. All worn out from all that 'nothing' you've been doing." Humilitas chuckled, easing his fingertips back through Superbia's thick, glossy hair. The Vice closed his eyes, content as always with being pampered. Worship was something of which he was habitually accustomed from any number of lives spent in the role of Emperor, Prince or movie star and no one expressed adoration quite so affluently as Humilitas.

"I'm conserving my energy," Superbia said, quite seriously. Humilitas looked down at him, brows forming curious umbrella's above his eyes. "He'll be here any day now. You remember what he was like. Constantly trying to throw his weight around."

"Ah yes. Always trying his best to topple the King." The Virtue gently teased. Superbia's eyes opened. He granted Humilitas a very meaningful, very poignant look.

"Bad enough in the beginning. But he's been alone a long time now, Mil. He's going to come back with a shit-storm of rage on. A bullet train of vengeance and butt-hurt he's going to want to direct down all the usual avenues. He'll derail us if given the chance." The Vice gazed into the middle distance; his spirit bristling with determination. "Damned if I let that bully have his way, again."

"Precisely. We much prefer the bully we already have." Humilitas laughed as Superbia's eyes snapped open, frowning unappreciatively up at the amused Virtue.

"I may be a bully, but at least I'm not a monster." The Vice stated, and it was enough to starve the Humilitas's humour entirely.

"Are you afraid?" He asked. A fair question. Most of them were.

"No." Superbia said, and the confidence, though expected, eased some of the anxiety from Humilitas's mind. "Pride is from where all sin stems. His attacking me would be like a branch whipping itself at the trunk of a tree trying to reach the roots. A pointless exercise and, even if it were to succeed, it would kill the tree to which it was attached."

"And yet he's just irrational enough to attempt such a thing," Humilitas gently, and rather ironically reminded him.

"Well, he can try until his thorny little heart's content." Superbia eased both hands behind his head, crossed his legs at the ankle. The picture perfect epitome of confidence. "I'm the strongest. He tries any of that shit on with Patientia again; he so much as _looks at any of us wrong,_ and I'll squash him like a bug."

"And failing that; Humanitas can stomp on him."

Superbia finally laughed. "That too. That too."

They were quiet now; lost in their thoughts. Humilitas at long last finally, and blissfully at peace with his feelings; in the knowing beyond reasonable doubt that the person he loved, returned those sentiments. He had never felt all the more reassured in his convictions; those which were, as Superbia had said, entirely selfish.

He did not want things to go back to the way they were.

He liked this world. He liked his place in it. He loved Superbia, and wished for nothing more than to share a life with him. A life what was free from the ever present shadow of the Apex, the Great Purpose, their Divine Mission, all that pish.

It was selfish, and ridiculous and fantastical. No small wonder his colleagues thought him a fool. He might as well have suggested that they all go shack up in a mermaid's palace under the sea, for how much sense it made.

There was something more to this world, than the sum of its parts. More to what it offered, than the primary reason for which it had been created.

Humilitas passed his fingers through Superbia's hair, his ancient and brilliant mind casting sneaky, traitorous thoughts about the inside of his head like a gaggle of youths at football training. And Superbia, who one would most reasonably suppose to have been steady in his convictions, continued to do his very best at pretending that he was not nearly as worried about things as he actually was.

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 8:05am~** _   
_**Some café - London Soho...** _

Gabriel arrived a half hour ahead of the scheduled time. No rest for the good, as they say. A statement what was rather the ironic one, given the enormous difficulty he was having in reconciling recent actions in conjunction with his, until now, unconditionally accepted 'goodness'.

Not just the end of times, it would seem, but the end of so many things.

He could swear that the first 'would-be' apocalypse had not been so complicated as this. There had been a linear path to follow, a step-by-step process as to how things were intended to progress. It had been as straightforward as following an instruction manual. Though of course, one such as Gabriel was void of the irony what pertained to instruction manuals and their association with Ikea furniture, and all the frustration, confusion and hair tearing what inevitably followed.

The archangel was nervous, and it was a foreign sensation. One of which, he would very much prefer to not have shared physical presence with. He had managed, in the space of fifteen earth minutes, to mutilate four otherwise perfectly good sachets of sugar and spill their saccharine entrails all across the tabletop. He hadn't even noticed that he had done it. His fingers had made work for themselves; apparently bored by his minds lack of attention to the needs of the flesh.

_The needs of the flesh..._

Gabriel sat up straight in his seat; ruffled the lapels of his designer coat and wiped his sugar speckled fingers across his forehead. He had started to sweat, though the temperature in the coffee shop was hardly what you might call tropical.

He could not stop thinking about the previous night.

The guilt lay heavy upon him; like a blanket gilt with iron adornments. Yet it was not the guilt what troubled him so much as the warm, burbling waves of pleasure what lapped at the corners of his mind, what took him away from the pervasive feelings of celestial fear and regret. What made him feel more the guilty for the relief it envisaged upon him.

Memories of the night before... of letting go. The blessed relief of giving in, of surrendering to those innate urges what had been dwelling in both his mind and earthly body. For months... for... centuries?

To have been so close to the one he had loved... Had? Was _had_ the right word? He wasn't sure, anymore.

He could still feel where they had been pressed together. Could remember still that wondrous, indescribable sensation of being tugged, and pressed and rubbed... Encapsulated on all sides by slick, tight, hugging heat. The pleasure what had overwhelmed his habitually stalwart senses; had made everything else dim by comparison. The rest of the world, the worries, the fears, everything what was the absolute unequivocal 'everything' of an angel's existence obliterated in that one sublime act of unification.

The sounds they had made... Raphael's - _no,_ Beelzebub's sounds. Evidence still of their own surrender. The change it had wrought in their face. The softening, the vulnerability, the needing pinch of their fingertips first into his back, and then, against the pectoral muscles of his chest. Their demand that he roll over, so that they could climb on top. Could stare down into his eyes, take control of their motions, deepen the act of penetration.

It must have hurt, Gabriel knew, because Beelzebub had winced and whimpered the once or twice. And then pushed past it and resumed their pace with the sort of steadfast determination that he knew was every inch the creature he understood them to be.

The act had been passionate, and carnal and... loving. It _had_ been, Gabriel realized. They had kissed so much. Had touched, and cupped and caressed. Had pressed their faces together, looked into one another's eyes, wended fingertips between fingertips, explored one another's bodies, worshipped each and every curve and line and dip as though nothing the more sacred had ever been unearthed.

No words. Not a word spoken from the moment they had dropped themselves upon that cheap, battered mattress of which functioning springs appeared to be very much at a premium. And that in itself, was the most telling thing of all. The silence.

"You ready to order yet?"

Gabriel gave a start what tore apart the fifth sachet he had been fiddling with. The waitress, having already evaluated him as being perhaps the single most handsome nutcase she had come across, did her best not to snort with laughter. One bulb short of a chandelier or not, the fellow clearly had money, and business was not so comfortable that it could abide the snubbing of potentially affluent clientele.

"Oh... yes. Yes, I would... like to..." Gabriel dithered a moment, eyes pinched shut and scrambling as to pinpoint what words were best suited to this human based interaction. It was always so much easier when Sandalphon was off-siding, but the Seraphim seemed particularly distracted that morning and in no swift rush to return to earth. "... purchase one of your... caffeinated beverages. Please."

An unintentional standoff occurred; with neither the archangel, nor the waitress any the better informed as to what was next supposed to have occurred. Finally, the young woman, having other charges on which to dance attendance, tired of the handsome gentleman's guppy like expression of inappropriate entitlement and triggered the remainder of the exchange by asking: "... Well, which one?"

Gabriel, once more desperately wishing that Sandalphon was present so as to help him stumble through this exchange much less gracelessly, picked up the laminated menu and swivelled it about so that it faced the right way.

"Which one... of course. Of course..." He perused the menu for a few tense seconds before, as a result of feeling both intensely flustered and under pressure, jabbed his finger at one of the options so hard that he almost pierced the laminate entirely. "This one, please."

The waitress leaned closer so as to take a look at what it was that Gabriel had selected. She raised a tinted, sceptical brow in response. "... A babycino?"

"Yes, thankyou. And..." The archangel gestured to the grease flecked booth opposite him. "Someone will be joining me soon... What do you have to drink that is sweet in flavour?"

"Our frappe's are pretty good." The waitress said with a shrug. She had no idea as to whether or not the frappes were any good. Some of her colleagues said that they were. Being lactose intolerant, it wasn't like she was in any position to judge. But being a waitress was far from being in a court of law, and so hearsay was not a condemnable offence in her line of work.

"Yes, one of those please." Gabriel said, setting down his menu with an intense air of satisfaction. "The sweetest one you have."

"Sure." The waitress replied, jotting down the order on her notepad and making her way back towards the counter. It occurred to her that perhaps her menial wage did in fact come with its small perks after all. Made for a few interesting stories to tell over drinks at the pub.

Gabriel gingerly set the laminated menu to the side, wringing his hands together a few times before then using them to sweep up sugar off of the table. He hadn't been thinking as to where the sugar was intended to go once he was done sweeping it, so as a result, most of it ended up square in his lap. He'd barely noticed that he had done it.

Images from the previous night continued to swirl about his mind like an antiquated washing machine grumbling its way through the rinse cycle. Some images rose to the surface with much greater vibrancy then others. Some so vibrant that they caused him to cross his legs. He near jumped out of the confines of his immaculate, sugar speckled suit as someone cleared their throat from beside the table.

"Sitting there with your eyez shut is a good way to get yourself killed." Lord Beelzebub observed, dropping themselves into the booth opposite Gabriel and setting their paper stuffed carry bag on the floor by their ankle. They winced a little, clearly still experiencing some physical discomfort from the evenings exertions.

Gabriel, being for once very much at odds as to how he was expected to behave, rose halfway out of his seat. Beelzebub glared at him, patently unimpressed.

"Sit down." They snapped. "You look ridiculous."

The wind staunchly sapped from his sails, Gabriel eased himself back into his squeaky leather seat. He was directing every ounce of energy at his disposal into maintaining some level of decorum, but it wasn't coming easy. He'd had practice with any other number of awkward, unexpected situations, but _this..._ nothing could have prepared him for this. He sincerely doubted as to whether any significant degree of practice could have made him less uncomfortable.

"I, um... I... ordered you a... beverage." He stuttered, trying to remain professional. Trying not to think of the naked, tiny body what was currently wrapped in the black, bespoke suit opposite him. Taking a mental nip at the pondering as to whether Lord Beelzebub had in fact retained the female form they had assumed the previous night.

The Lord of the Infernal regions blinked, their brows furrowing in evidence of their annoyance. Whilst Gabriel could barely string a sentence together, their disposition was just as dour and as practical as ever.

"Why?"

"I thought... you might have wanted one?" Gabriel replied, uncertainly. It had seemed the appropriate thing to do, given the circumstances.

"I'm perfectly capable of ordering for myself. We're not on a date. We're here to do the one job, az quickly and az painlessly az possible. I certainly don't intend to dither." Beelzebub rolled their eyes, plainly irritated as the cream topped frappe was placed down on a napkin by their elbow. They nonetheless took a sip and was very annoyed to discover how delicious it actually was. Bless the Archangel for actually paying some attention to what it was they enjoyed.

Gabriel stared questioningly at his own offering; a small, white cup of what appeared to be little more than milk froth. The cup itself would not have been out of place in a dolls house.

"Um... thankyou." He said, looking altogether ridiculous as he pinched the tiny handle of the cup between his thumb and index finger and took a sip from the foam. A small dab clung to his upper lip, and he took a silver threaded handkerchief from out of his lapel and used it to clean himself off. His heart had started thumping in his chest. He knew that the questions would not have been at all appreciated, but he was compelled to ask them nonetheless. "And how are you, um... doing?"

"Don't start." Beelzebub bluntly replied.

"I was only-"

"Well, don't. Something happened which shouldn't have happened. It'z counter-productive to our effortz." They took another long draw down the spiral straw of their drink and instantly regretted it. The ice cold beverage drove pain through one of their back molars, further adding to their rapidly mounting irritation. "I suggezt that we forget about it and move on."

Gabriel persisted. "I just want to know that you're all right."

Beelzebub gave him a very unappreciative look in return. "Well don't we think highly of ourselvez?" They said.

"There was... some... blood, and-"

"What part of not wanting to talk about it, are you juzt not getting?" The demon snapped. Their agitation was abrading further by the minute. Gabriel was not blind to this, but couldn't seem to stop himself from going further with it.

"I'm worried about you!" He said, and surprised himself somewhat by the admission. Yes, yes he was worried. Worried and sick with guilt and fear and the not knowing what was now expected of him. Surely life could not just return to the way it was before. Something had transpired between them; something enormous and terrifying and world shattering. Something impossible to ignore, to pretend away.

Something far the greater than mounting irritation burst from the centre of Lord Beelzebub's face like a carnivorous plant sensing the buzzing of a nearby fly. Anger. Raw, unfettered, fierce and blazing. Such extremities rarely made their mark within the habitually stoic creatures soul, but the archangel's words had bitten into what was a still tender centre.

_Why could he not just... Where did he get off..._

"Get fucked." Beelzebub snarled, snatching their drink from the table and hooking their carry bag about their shoulders with all the conviction of a hangman whence dropping the noose about a doomed mans shoulders. They swung themselves out of the booth, narrow body barely making the slightest impact against the corner of the table as they stormed for the door. Gabriel had barely time enough in which to down the last of his over frothed milk, pay for the drinks (including an, as of always overly generous, though not necessarily intended tip) before chasing the irate demon out into the busy, bustling streets of London town.

It took a moment so as to pick them out of the crowd. Their unusual attire helped; for there was not many humans what got about wearing a hat in the style of a lampoonish blowfly. Not in England, anyway.

Beelzebub was storming up the sidewalk, crossing side streets with a pre-emptive flick of their hand towards any cars what might have thought to intrude upon their suitably dramatic strut. Gabriel scurried into their wake; like a dolphin, riding the bows of a cruise liner, always at risk of being sucked backwards into the sharp, chopping blades what whirled thunderously beneath the surface.

Whatever was circulating beneath Beelzebub's surface, Gabriel thought, was far more threatening than a steel blade could ever be.

"I didn't mean to upset you." He said. He meant it, which was the most extraordinary thing of all. Something was shifting beneath the chopping of those waves, and it was not simply the a threat what threaded its ways through the waters like an oil slick. Something burbled deeper still. Something that was historic, that was ageless, what drove rigours through the mortal cable and reverberated deep into the cordons of the eternal spirit.

 _What was this?_ Gabriel wondered. And despised himself in the attempt of fooling himself.

He knew what this was. He knew full well.

"Seven thousand yearz down the track, you get your dick wet once and suddenly develop a conscience?" Beelzebub not so much asked, as bitterly stated. They knew full well where Gabriel's mind was at. The struggle itself was what was insulting. As insulting and as decimating as it had been all those many thousands of years earlier. "Don't make me laugh. Millenia too late to pretend like you give a shit."

"But I do give a shit." Gabriel said, without thinking. Without hesitation. It almost caused him to be skittled by a passing mail van, such was his shock in having confessed such a thing. With how easily the words had come.

Yes... Yes he _did_ give a shit. Of course he had tried so desperately so as to _not_ let those old feelings creep in. To keep it all professional, and practical. To focus on the task at hand.

What a fool he had been; to let himself believe that such a thing was possible.

They had loved one another, once upon a time. An instance of betrayal was not enough so as to quash the trace residue of their history entirely.

It left a trigger within the soul. A trigger what had been set off, from the first moment of their having come together in both ironic and reluctant mutual interest. Gabriel had long been fooling himself with the belief that the feelings had gone away. Time and distance had simply allowed for him to shelve them; out of sight, out of mind. The door was now open, and light was shining through; illuminating that which darkness had kept discretely veiled for so long.

"Don't make me throw my drink at you again." Beelzebub stepped down off of the curb and stormed into the busy morning traffic. A late model Volvo almost ploughed into them, but with a wave of the demon's petite hand the vehicle was sent careening wildly off to the left, where it imposed its wrath upon an innocently reposing fire hydrant. Water erupted belligerently from serrated piping, one stream stretching for the Heavens whilst the second upended its frustrations upon the windshield of the buckled, smoking car.

No one paid any mind to the incensed, black suited figure in the peculiar hat as it stomped its way across the road; nor to the tall, immaculately dressed man in the grey coat and wingtips that scooted along at their heels like a whipped dog, desperate for its masters forgiveness.

"Where are you going?" Gabriel asked, catching his toe on the curb and almost nose diving into the sidewalk. Beelzebub, still five steps ahead, did nothing in the means of providing assistance.

"To the bookshop, you idiot!" They took a vehement slug from their frappe, cool eyes trained resolutely on the street ahead. Most humans seemed to get the hint that theirs was a presence entirely unwelcome on the footpath at that moment, and did their utmost to get out of the irritated demon's way. "It'z time we got this settled once and for all."

Gabriel would have considered his earthly body to have been a reasonably fit one. But even he was having difficulty keeping up with Beelzebub's tiny, determined gait. The demon, it was plain to see, had at long last reached the end of their tether. The pretence was beyond the point of being bandied.

God would not be their witness. But someone would. And with that someone as their witness, Lord Beelzebub would not be leaving that bookshop until the Principality had heard them out.

An observant enough human may have noticed that were the demons feet fell, steam rose from the concrete. It was there but a moment, and stank of the darkest, most fearful nooks in which tortured souls cried out to unheeding ears for a mercy what would never be granted.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Not a very meaty update, I know, but at least a little something to keep things ticking over. In the next chapter, Lord Beelzebub and Gabriel pay a visit to the bookstore and check in on a wobbly hungover angel. Humanitas makes his way to Soho. Crowley deals with the inelegant side effects of 'first-times'.
> 
> Dear readers, I hope that you and your loved ones are keeping safe during these trying times. The road ahead is a long one, but we will eventually see the other side.
> 
> If any of you reading this ever feel like reaching out during this time to talk, feel absolutely free to do so. What is happening in the world right now is scary and surreal and now, more than ever, we need to be kind and supportive to one another and I would be more than happy to lend an ear to anyone who needs it :) 
> 
> Sending you all so much love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	58. Or, in which one is now really craving a chip butty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Welcome back to another chapter, guys! As usual, just want to give my thanks to all of you who read and kudoed since the last chapter. Extra special thanks go out to dusm, FantasyTLOU and Winzy for leaving some lovely comments. You guys have always been so supportive, and I feel very lucky to have you! Cheers again! :) 
> 
> Don't want to go on too much about all the COVID shit (goodness knows, it has spotlight enough to last it another couple of centuries) but just wanted to send my love and support out to all of you right now. Especially my American and UK readers, who I know are doing it especially tough at this time. Here in Australia we seem to be (touch wood) flattenig the curve finally, but for the rest of the world, I know shit is really scary right now. Keep being strong and smart, everyone. There is another side to this, and we will see it!
> 
> Anyway, enough about that. Fanfiction is a chance to take a break from the real world for a while, and with that in mind; another new chapter, dear readers!

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 8:10 am~** _   
_**Theresa's Hall - Belgravia London...** _

_**Nine months to the apex...** _

Patientia was smoking her third rollie of the morning when the wave hit her.

She felt as though all the blood in her body had drained down into her feet. Her skin was clammy. A light film of sweat adhered itself to her flesh. She was forced to reach out and steady a hand on the garden archway, pricking her palm on one of the rose thorns as a result.

The bond, what had been for so long severed, came together once more, like two separate pieces of dough rolled into one.

"There you are, my darling. Been looking high and low for you!"

Patientia might have been rendered stock still, if not for the pervasive tremors what lay siege to her slender body. She stood there; staring into the void, eyes bulging unattractively, long since forgotten cigarette stub pinched between her fingers and barely still smouldering. The voice what had called to her was one she did not recognize right away. And yet it coincided all too perfectly with the dreaded feeling of prospective unification.

_It made no sense... for him to have been able to sneak up on her like that. Surely... surely she would have... sensed him sooner..._

Footfalls behind her, more than the one and Patientia recognized with great relief, the dualistic aura of both Superbia and Humilitas. It had been the Vice of Pride what had called to her, and the Virtue chastised herself for not having recognized his prodigious tone immediately. She'd had centuries enough with which to get acquainted with it, after all.

"We're heading out for a bite to eat," Superbia continued, affecting an ever so characteristic drawl that was as self-serving as it was somehow lacking. "With every offence to the cook, I'm craving something a mite fancier than eight squares of mixed fruits, wheat toast and scrambled eggs."

"Could you be anymore of a perfect snob?" Humilitas asked affectionately, to which the Vice replied by way of a particularly self-satisfied smile. "In any event, we thought you might like to join us? Take your mind off your worries for an hour or s-" The Virtue paused, eyes squinted from behind the thick lenses of his glasses as he circled about to take a closer look at Patientia. "Aether's feet, you're white as a ghost. Are you feeling quite well?"

"He's here." Patientia said, in an appropriately dramatic fashion. The bond tightened further and her knees trembled. Humilitas was forced to catch her before she collapsed entirely, taking the long since forgotten rollie out of her hand and dashing it out in the ashtray set upon the nearby table.

Superbia, getting her meaning entirely, turned idly on the spot, glancing about the garden area. The slightest most quirk of his right brow the only true evidence of his concern.

"At the manor, you mean?"

Patientia shook her head as Humilitas assisted with lowering her onto a wrought iron bench. "Just outside of London. Getting closer. Fast." She lowered her head, took a few deep, grossly insubstantial breaths. She flinched as another wave went through her, and whatever calm she might have effaced from the breathing exercise, was rendered null and void. "Fuck, he's angry. Oh, I can feel all the... rage pushing in against me."

"One look at the news could tell you that much." Humilitas remarked, being one of the few who actually acquainted himself with human affairs. "You can see the path he's carved across the world. All those towns where people have ended up rioting, fighting. Surprised he hasn't started a war yet."

"Won't be too long. The rate he's going." Patientia attempted to get to her feet. She felt intensely weak; as though recovering from a severe bout of the flu. "I have to go. I have to go meet him."

"You're in no state to be doing anything!" Humilitas protested, reaching out to steady her as she staggered about like a newborn foal.

"What else do you suggest I do?! Every minute that he remains unbalanced, the more people he's going to-" Patientia trailed off, overwrought with emotion. With guilt. This was her responsibility. All those humans what had been hurt, who had been killed, could have been prevented if she had made her way to her secondary earlier. It was her fault. Waiting another moment longer was out of the question. "Our base is here in London. We can't afford to draw too much attention to ourselves. If he's not kept in check, he'll do what he's always done."

"I don't see how it matters. Who has the power to interfere with us, anyway? But I agree with the old bastard being pulled into line." Superbia took a moment to straighten the sleeves of his purple, leopard print coat, before taking a pair of designer sunglasses from an inside pocket and sliding them over his eyes. "I'll go with you."

Patientia's eyes blazed urgently. "I can't run the risk of your being-"

The Vice of Pride took little pains to dampen the expectantly haughty snort what burst from between his lips. "No offence, darling, but the only person who tells me what I can and can't do is Harry-High-Pants over here." He dipped his head towards Humilitas, who attempted to figure out whether he should in fact be insulted or not. "And only when we're in the bedroom, at that. You head out to meet that bastard alone, he'll start doing all that same shit what saw him exiled in the first place. Can't go letting him think he can get away with that anymore. A precedent has to be set."

"But what if he-"

"Hurts me?" Superbia gave a brazen, unconcerned laugh. "He'd have to catch me with my eyes shut and my pants down to have a chance in Hell!" He reached over, taking Patientia's hands in his own and giving them a squeeze. His usual, arrogant smile was for once absent, replaced instead by something that was genuinely warm and comforting. "You're not in this alone. We'll get through this together. As a team."

Patientia at long last permitted that feeling of intense relief to sweep through her. She knew that Superbia had a soft spot when it came to the Virtue's, and could be very protective when it suited him. He was also the most powerful of their earthbound kind, and the best chance of standing up to her secondary, putting him firmly in his place and keeping him there. If anyone was safe to accompany her, it would be him.

And she was gladdened by it. It wasn't right, nor charitable to want to be protected from the cross that was hers to bear. But it was impossible to pretend as though the Vice's words did not in fact ease some of the profound terror she was experiencing. In that moment, she loved him for that. As much as a Virtue was capable of loving a Vice what was not their own.

"Thank you, Superbia." She said, reaching up to press a kiss to his cheek. Superbia, as expected, did his best not to show how embarrassed he was by the gratitude.

"We had best be making like a tree, then, and the sooner the better." Humilitas said, easing himself off of the bench and brushing down the seat of his slacks. Superbia gave a flick of his finger and the bench suddenly scooted forwards, hitting the Virtue in the back of his knees and sending him thumping back down square onto his backside.

" _You_ are going nowhere." The Vice said, smirking at the stunned look on Humilitas's face as he rubbed the length of his wounded legs. "You're about as useful in a fight as a condom machine in the Vatican. What would your strategy be? Humble him into being a good boy?"

"Well how exactly are you supposing you'll get to wherever the old boy's at?" Humilitas asked, watching as Superbia and Patientia, having cottoned on, exchanged dubious glances. "Neither one of you can drive."

"...Can get a taxi." Superbia said at last, with a shrug. Humilitas laughed out loud.

"Oh yes, a fine idea! And put the innocent human taxi driver at risk!" He dragged himself up off of the seat again, passing a hand over the backs of his knees what dispensed with the bruising that had appeared there. "Look, there's a spare car here what belongs to the house itself. Let me drive you, at least."

"Fine." Superbia said, pointing a finger dead square at Humilitas's face as the Virtue walked back over to him. "But when we get there, _you're_ staying in the car."

Humilitas chuckled. "Ah, yes. Makes sense, of course. Because we won't then be putting him _in_ the car to come back here to Theresa's Hall. That should keep me perfectly safe."

"Don't be a smart-arse, it doesn't suit you." Superbia cupped a hand beneath Humilitas's jaw and gave him a quick peck on the mouth. Patientia smiled, a little curious about the shift in the pair's energy. She'd never seen them look quite so relaxed with one another, and wondered if something had changed in the past couple of days. Aether could only hope. Humilitas certainly deserved a great deal more than that which he had long since learned to live with.

"It's a shame," Humilitas said, linking his arm with Superbia's as the three of them headed back into the mansion. "I was hoping it would be Caritas what would turn up next. Why do you suppose it's taking them so long to get here?"

"They're coming from New Zealand," Superbia clarified, waiting of course for Humilitas to open the door for him before stepping inside. "Avaritia spoke to them this morning. Silly bugger kept giving away their plane tickets to 'people who needed them more'. Only just managed to get their arse over here. Then they wandered off from the airport. Got wind of something 'un-charitable', wanted to try and sort it out before making their way here. Avaritia and Industria went to pick them up about a half-hour ago."

"Probably a good thing. Apocalypse'll be over by the time they make their own way here. You know what they're like."

"Yeah. An adorable airhead." Superbia said, though not without some degree of fondness. Caritas was typically considered to be the most beloved of their kind; possessed of a sweet, charming yet oftentimes gullible disposition what most usually saw them fall prey to any number of scams and sob stories. Though Avaritia and Superbia had amassed enormous wealth in their thousands of years on earth, Caritas was lucky to have the clothes on their back and even these they would have given away if someone had simply walked up and asked for them. They had once turned up for their ten year reunion sans shoes, having 'donated' them to a street urchin.

"I suppose I'll barely see you once Caritas gets here," Humilitas teased. "The two of you will go off and disappear into a cloud of reefer smoke, opioids and poor decisions. As per usual."

"Don't go and make out like you're being purposefully excluded!" Superbia shot back, to which the Virtue of Humility took to laughing. "It's hardly my fault that you're a terrible bore who never wants to partake. Look at you, all early morning jogs, wheat grass smoothies and clean living. You sober people give me the shits. Get down off of your high horse every once in a while and live a little." He performed a double take as the three of them passed through the kitchen; with its lingering hint of warm buttered toast and freshly squeezed orange juice. "And have you been wearing that horrible tie this whole time?! Why has it taken me this long to notice?!"

"And here we go..." Humilitas said, passing a hand down the front of his favourite tie. It was dark blue with a motif of cheerful looking rubber ducks dotted about the length. He always considered it a wonderfully uplifting thing. Superbia, in glaring contrast, found it about as uplifting as an oil tanker's anchor whence weighed down by parental disappointments and chronic pre-pubescent self doubts.

"I think it's lovely." Patientia said, her smile perhaps a little more sad than usual. Envy was not a trait of which she was at all familiar, but it was hard not to feel a little jealous of Humilitas and Superbia's relationship. Bickering aside, they got along like a house on fire and seemed to genuinely enjoy one another's company. She had never known any of that genuine affection from her own secondary.

"Of course _you_ would." Superbia said, with a level of snottiness that most toddlers would gleefully aspire to. "I can't _believe_ you were going to let me be seen in public with you wearing that ludicrous thing. Bad enough your pants are hiked up to your armpits. Don't you ever just stop and think about the impact your decisions have on me?"

"Why do you even care what a bunch of soon-to-be-dead humans think anyway?" Humilitas asked, enjoying himself immensely. He took a set of car keys from a hook by the garage door, before pulling it open and allowing Patientia and Superbia to enter ahead of him. "Surely you're not that insecure."

"I'm going to feed that thing through the pasta maker when we get back." The Vice of Pride hissed, pausing by the passenger side door of the black and grey 1951 Triumph Mayflower, and tapping a foot expectantly. Humilitas unlocked the vehicle and held the door open, waiting until Superbia had elegantly fed himself into the seat before closing it. Patientia had already installed herself in the back and was swiftly buckling herself in.

"Put your seatbelt on." Humilitas said, climbing into the drivers side and inserting the key. Superbia stuck his nose in the air.

" _You_ put your seatbelt on." Was the ever so mature response that he received. Bad enough that Superbia was going to be _seen_ in such an embarrassing car in the first place; buckling into it just felt like far too much commitment.

The Vice of Pride instead rolled down the window (manual handles, good _grief_ ) and leant his arm out, curling his fingers into a fist which he then pumped into the air. "Come on, let's get moving. I'm well geared for a rumble."

"There'll be no rumbling. Behave yourself." Humilitas reached over and slapped Superbia reproachfully on the thigh.

"Boring. Surprised they don't just pipe your voice into operating theatres; use it in place of anaesthesia."

"Hate you."

"Hate you more."

"Boys, seriously?" Patientia asked, about as amused as she was exasperated. Already in the midst of rolling another smoke, which she had every intention of puffing out the window of the car. "Can we put the flirting on hold for now? We got shit what needs doing."

"Who's flirting?" Superbia asked, jabbing a thumb incredulously towards his secondary. "With him? You've got to be joking."

"Just when I thought we were starting to get along," Humilitas purposefully bemoaned, quietly pleased by the soft, secretive look Superbia chanced them with, before then returning his attention to the nothing that was so far happening outside the window. The Principle Virtue of Humility started the car up, opened the garage door and eased the old luxury vehicle down the driveway and into the morning bustle of London's early morning commuters.

They were quiet a while then, and Patientia, though having half-heartedly complained about the bickering, rather the wished that they would start in on it again. Far the better than to silently dwell on what was coming.

She smoked the rollie far the more quickly than she had been expecting. Had to ask for Humilitas to slow down, so that she could roll another.

Hard enough to pull anything together when your hands were shaking like that.

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 8:35 am~** _   
_**The Grange Estate Nursing Home...** _

Crowley was having an... interesting morning so far.

On the way to work, he had surrendered to hangover fuelled temptation and swung into the drive through of a fast food chain he would, under most circumstances, never be caught dead in. He purchased a toasted chip butty, with bacon and tomato relish and committed the ultimate of offences by wolfing it down in the Bentley.

He managed to get most of the sandwich into his mouth, to the exception of a few saucy pieces of bacon and chips that plateaued into his lap on one or two particularly tight corners. Upon arriving in the work carpark, he whisked the stains away with a puff of air and cleaned himself up with some wet wipes he kept in the glove compartment, giving the car seat a going over at the same time.

It had been worth the work, he had quickly decided, having felt a Heaven of a lot better for getting a good concentrate of grease into his system.

Work was much as it ever was. Boris demonstrated a rare kindness in not spitting in Crowley's face that particular morning, for which he was especially grateful. On a number of occasions, the demon was however forced to excuse himself and make a bolt to the staff bathroom; having experienced some rather the odd, and ostensibly suspicious sensations down below. Sensations what made him feel that he was about to, at any moment, follow the incontinent example set by some of his elderly charges.

 _Certainly takes some of the romance out of the situation,_ Crowley thought, perched on the toilet for the third time that morning, subject to the whims of a bottom that didn't seem to know quite what to do with itself. He had frequented the facilities when he had first arrived at work, and for obvious reasons had found that the undesirable act of human evacuation had come a lot easier than usual.

The problem was that his body appeared to be under the illusion that it needed to 'stay open for business'. Everything felt... looser down below. There was a bit of white, streaky residue in his underpants. And though he had scrubbed and cleaned well in the shower, Crowley couldn't quite dispense with the fear that he somehow stank.

All that aside, he certainly felt more confident. Why having sex made any difference in so far as boosting his self-esteem he couldn't say, but something had changed. He felt as though he had a sort of glow about him; a glow that others were also aware of. Maybe it was the fact that he couldn't keep the smile off of his face, that he was laughing a lot more, that his walk (though naturally stilted) had a bit more of a strut to it. Chloe had been giving him a few curious looks during their shift; looks what swiftly gained clarity when Josie's aged hand found its habitual mark upon Crowley's backside in the hallway, causing him to yelp and flinch so violently that he near about snapped his spine in two.

"So... looks like you and Alex made up last night?" She surmised, following Crowley out to the smoking area for their fifteen minute break.

The demon, still very pleased with himself, flashed a grin over his shoulder and held up two fingers. Chloe, getting his meaning right away, laughed as she settled down on the door stoop with her cup of tea.

"You big tart! Twice in one night, huh?" She chuckled softly to herself, watching Crowley gingerly mount the bench and perch on the back of it; as per his morning ritual. "It's nice you guys are still so into each other."

"Why?" Crowley asked, strongly suspecting that he should take offence. "Because we're both a pair of disgusting old farts who'd be better off watching the Antique's Road Show and rubbing Tiger Palm into each others sciatic nerves than hopping on our good foot and doing the bad thing?"

Chloe gave a patient smile. " _No._ I meant because you've been together so long, it's great that you still have that chemistry." She dunked her tea bag a couple of times, before adding, in a somewhat meaningful way: "It's not always easy to keep things hot and heavy in long term relationships. Believe me, I know."

"How would you know?" Crowley asked, wrinkling his nose suspiciously. "You're only, what, twenty-six? How many long term relationships could you have possibly been in?"

"I'm older than I look." Chloe sniffed, wrapping the string of her teabag about a spoon and using it to drain the last of the liquid out of the bag before dropping it onto the saucer. "I've earned my stripes, believe you me."

Crowley, clearly unconvinced, placed a cigarette between his lips, lit it and took a deep drag. As they had so often taken to doing that morning, images of the night before drifted in again and filled his mind and body with that wonderfully warm and excited feeling. He grinned to himself, trying his darndest not to give a little squirm in response to some of the memories he was currently indulging. The feeling of Aziraphale's fingers first entering his body was one he particularly enjoyed.

It had been nice... the fingers. He honestly thought that this was what he had enjoyed the most. The sex itself had been outstanding, but there was something about the deliberateness of the angel's fingering what had been especially arousing.

When Aziraphale had been fucking him, that was the two of them experiencing pleasure in the same moment. There was something... mindless and instinctual about the angel's thrusts; his utter absorption in the nature of the act itself.

But when he had used his fingers, his focus had been dedicated entirely to the pleasure he had been giving Crowley. He had been slow, and purposeful and he had watched Crowley so carefully, watched what he was doing...

Crowley gave a small, involuntary squirm at this. Yes, _that_ was the reason. It had been Aziraphale looking at him; all that decorum stripped away in the wake of pleasure he had derived from watching the demon moan, and writhe and gasp beneath him. That voyeuristic element, what Crowley would never have expected from the likes of one such as Aziraphale; whose entire _raison d'etre_ was in the consumption of things. In reading, in eating, in drinking; the direct experience and indulgence of pleasure itself.

"It was pretty good." Crowley murmured, bringing himself swiftly back to reality. It wasn't difficult to refocus his attentions. Aziraphale's behaviour that morning was enough so as to sober a judge. "Be better if Alex wasn't acting like such a space case today." He added, taking a small sip from his coffee. Much more to the side of bitter, which seemed appropriate.

Chloe gave an understanding nod, teacup perched just below her chin. "Let me guess; you were both drunk and you got a bit weird and now he's got the post-freaky-bang guilts on."

"Well, it wasn't just that we were drunk." Crowley confessed. He took a quick glance towards the door, ensuring that it was all the way shut, before leaning in and lowering his voice. "We, uh... we ended up using the disco biscuits."

"The... disco biscuits?" Chloe asked, giving him an odd look. It took her a moment to understand what he meant. Granted she had never heard the term 'disco biscuits' in her entire life, but Anthony was a bit of an odd duck with particularly bizarre turns of phrase, at times. "Oh... the pills you mean. Really?" She continued to look dubious even as Crowley nodded. "That's a surprise. Don't get me wrong, it's just Alex... he didn't seem the type, y'know?"

"He's not. Like you said, we were both pretty drunk and he got a bit... spontaneous. Next minute-" Crowley made a gesture, as though tossing something into his mouth. Chloe's brows rose into the barely there lines of her forehead.

"It was _his_ idea? Guessing it's not something he normally does. Given his reaction at the pub last night."

"He's never done drugs. I mean, he used to smoke obviously and he likes a drink, but that's about it." Crowley chuckled softly to himself. "He only tried powdered sherbet the first time six years ago, because he thought it might be a gateway into other fine-grained illicit substances."

Chloe could not help but to laugh at this. The very idea of avoiding deserts like 'rainbow sherbet' for fear of it serving as slippery slope into drug addiction, was a frightfully amusing one. "Well, try and not let it stress you out too much. He's probably just feeling a bit spaced out because of the pill and trying to pull his head together." She took a sip from her tea and peered over the chipped rim of her cup, giving Crowley a questioning look. "Should you really be working?" She asked. "It's probably still in your system, babes."

Crowley held up his index finger and thumb, spaced apart at the approximate length of a bee's dick. "Only took a half a one. I feel fine. Just a bit dry, if anything."

"You had best message Alice and let her know everything's okay. Poor girl's been wigging out, thinking she broke the two of you up again. She'll be relieved to know that the only thing got broke was your arse."

"Already did." Crowley wiggled his phone from side to side, before slipping it back into his trouser pocket. "Doubt I'll hear back from her 'til at least after midday."

They were quiet together a moment. A swallow chirped impertinently from its roost atop the garden gazebo. They put seed out sometimes for the birds, you see, but had forgotten to top up the feeder, what with how busy it had been that morning. Perhaps the swallow noticed, and was, in it's own way, trying to remind them. They didn't pay it much mind. Both had quite enough of their own thoughts to be getting along with.

"Sorry, just..." Chloe chuckled softly, hoping that her words weren't about to cause offense. "It's a little hard to imagine. He seems like such a gentleman. Hard to imagine him gettin' all -" She made a lewd gesture; as though grabbing an invisible lover about the hips and gifting them with a particularly committed, and overzealous thrust.

"You and me both, sister." Crowley said, with a smile. It was hardly the type of assumption with which to take exception. Aziraphale was every bit as pompous and button-downed as he appeared. The shift in his behaviour; the way in which he had so unashamedly indulged his desires and the passion what had come roaring out of him like a deluge, had been entirely unexpected. Far from unappreciated, of course. Crowley was sore, and tired and his mouth was dryer than a nun's thatch, and yet he quivered still with anxious anticipation.

He wanted the shift over and done with, so he could head back to the bookshop and do it all over again. Surely, Aziraphale was done with his moping for the day. A couple of drinks and a nice dinner would have put him in the right frame of mind, if nothing else would. They would talk it out, exsanguinate the guilt and head back to Crowley's for the evening. The bed was far the more accommodating there, and Crowley had more than a couple of idea's as to how they might best utilize that space.

As Chloe busied herself checking her Facebook feed, Crowley retrieved his phone and checked his messages. Nothing new, but that wasn't a surprise. His notifications were switched on, and he would have heard a 'Ping' if anything had come through. It was a little disappointing, and yet every bit as to be expected. He had always been the one to reach out first in their relationship. Aziraphale's most recent efforts aside, this was par for the course how things had always worked between them.

Crowley managed to pluck out a message with the hand what wasn't holding his cigarette. He had ample practice with such things, of course. Aziraphale in comparison, often needed to hold the phone firm with one hand, whilst jabbing at the correct letters with his index finger; frequently getting it wrong and needing to go back and erase the mistake he had made. The poor angel had not yet acquainted himself with 'predictive text' and perhaps never would.

 _ **How goes the clean-up efforts?**_ Crowley asked, deciding to keep it congenial for now. He sent the message, expecting that it wasn't likely to garner a response any time soon, and went back to his cigarette. He was surprised to hear the phone 'ping' a reply not five seconds later. Quite unlike Aziraphale to camp on his mobile, but the world was certainly full of stranger things.

 _ **Gradually. Still feeling a little less than average.**_ Crowley watched as the series of white dots, indicating that the other person was still typing, flexed themselves below the message. A moment later: _**Are you all right?**_

Crowley's thumb flew across the keyboard. _**Little sore.**_ He hesitated a moment, knowing full well what it was that he wanted to do, what he wanted to indulge. He had thought about this moment so long, how it would feel to be just like the other work girls. All giddy and glowing from their 'night before's'; sending suggestive, flirtatious messages back to their significant others and/or hook up's. Sort of preening to one another, almost purring their contentment, having a sigh or a giggle at the messages they received back. Crowley wasn't envious of much in this world, but he couldn't help but feel a little jealous of the attention they received. He'd looked forward to this, and it wasn't at all playing out like he had imagined.

Nevertheless, he decided to throw caution to the wind. After all, theirs was a dance in which he had always been required to take the lead. Waiting around for Aziraphale to take initiative, was like waiting for a married man to pick up the singlet top he had left on the bathroom floor and placing it in the laundry hamper that was two feet away. In the absence of direct intervention, it was never going to happen.

 _ **Can't stop thinking about last night. It was amazing. YOU were amazing ;)**_ Crowley pecked out. He had no experience with talking dirty (let alone typing it) and decided to say simply and honestly what it was he was actually feeling. _**The way you felt inside of me... Can't wait 'til this shift is done and I can head home.**_

Crowley expected that Aziraphale would not respond to this; more the likely becoming so flustered that he wouldn't know what to say. So it did come as a surprise to the demon to hear a reply come through not two seconds later. He was a little embarrassed to feel his heartrate elevate itself, as he took the phone back out of his pocket. So this was the nervous excitement the girls got to feel so often; that anticipation of reciprocation, the extension of the passion and intimacy what was shared in private spaces, behind closed doors or, on the floors of bookshops, in his case.

Crowley opened the message and felt something heavy and cold drop from his chest into the pit of his stomach. There was nothing warm, nothing suggestive in how Aziraphale had responded. He sounded almost curt, and non-committal.

 _ **Make sure to concentrate on your work**_ , He said. _**I'll see you when you get back.**_

 _ **Right.**_ Crowley replied, assuming that Aziraphale was most likely quietly chastising him for daydreaming. It wouldn't have been the first time. _**Love you, angel.**_

He waited a moment, but there was no reply. A minute passed before he reluctantly slipped the phone back into his pocket, and took a drag on his cigarette. A long worm of ash had formed on the tip and it splintered off into nothingness with but a tap from the demon's trembling finger.

He was practiced at pretending as though Aziraphale's lack of commitment didn't bother him. It was, however, a skill of which he had been desperately hoping to let go of, and resented having to continue to keep his theoretical muscles toned.

He was patient, where a demon was concerned. But that patience was ever so gradually starting to wear thin.

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 8:40 am~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's...** _

Aziraphale wiped the square of toilet paper across his lower lip before dropping it into the bowl, and pressing a trembling finger to the button on the cistern. The cumulative mess what adhered to the surface of the water swirled into a tidal pool, before being sucked punitively down the drain.

Aziraphale pushed himself up off of the floor, lips pressed together tightly as he made his way to the vanity. He washed and scrubbed his hands vigorously. It did nothing whatsoever to rid him of the lingering sensation of nausea what dwelt at the back of his throat, like a suspicious hooded gentlemen lurking by a dark alleyway hoping you'll be fool enough to drift within shivving distance.

The angel had not been having a good morning, so far. It had taken him almost an hour so as to properly acclimate himself and even then, he had been unable to shake the terrible, oppressive feeling of anxiety, what took up pride of place within his chest and proceeded to dig its horrid little claws in deeper and deeper by the moment. A few times, the sensation had become almost unbearable; to the point that Aziraphale had felt tempted to guzzle down half a bottle of _Lagavulin 16_ just so as to alleviate it, somehow.

It was not often that he suffered the unenviable mostly human side effects of drinking too much. He had heard talk of this rumoured 'booze blues'; where depression, anxiety and regret were a common staple, but had so far been fortunate to have never experienced it for himself. He was able to sober up, after all, and limited were the times in which he had failed to do so and been forced to wake with a gurgling stomach, dry mouth and a head what felt as though it had been remorselessly squeezed between two steel bars. A wave of the hand, and a minor miracle later was all it took to dispense with that unnecessary unpleasantness and then the day was his to seize as he saw fit.

No such luck, this time. Oh sure, the headache and nausea were a simple matter to dispense with. But the anxiety simply refused to budge. Not even a real miracle could have sent that one skittering for the shadows, he imagined. It walked hand in hand with the reticent feelings of guilt what continued to burble up inside of him; impossible to push to the side or negate in any meaningful way.

The memories kept pushing their way to the forefront; like an entitled passenger, late to check in at the arrival gate, whom somehow believed their tardiness permission enough to shove aside all those other commuters what had spent an hour or so patiently waiting their turn.

It was all a little hazy, but even this was clarity enough to rankle Aziraphale entirely. Images of what he and Crowley had done the night before; what _he_ had done. How filthy, and lowbrow the nature of his indulgence. How unashamed and selfish.

Pushing each of his fingers inside of Crowley's compliant, eager body; as though every one of them had been entitled their turn. The places his tongue and lips had dwelt; had supped and savoured. The thoughtless, violent nature of his thrusts; how his mind had broached something similar to madness for the pleasure what had overwhelmed his senses. How everything else had ceased to matter, save for this and this alone.

_Even Crowley faded out of importance. I cared nothing for his discomfort, or pain. Not truly._

_All that mattered was that he was there, and he was willing and that once I had started fucking him, there was nothing in any of the known worlds what could have forced me to stop._

This was the thought what frightened and repulsed Aziraphale most of all. Knowing full well, that he'd absolutely no desire to stop. Might not have done, even if Crowley had begged him to.

It was this thought, what then coupled with the traces of congealed blood Aziraphale had found on the floor and on his books, what had tipped him over the edge. The unequivocal proof of his having _harmed_ Crowley, had caused him pain and injury. All for want of his letting go; of being foolish and reckless and selfish.

Aziraphale had barely made it to the bathroom before the sickness overwhelmed him. He'd vomited with the sort of violence that seems to go all the way down into the gallows of your belly; what rips apart stomach lining and threatens to bring your upper intestine along for the ride. His neck and shoulders felt sore from the heaving, though he hadn't a thought as to healing himself. The discomfort was the least he deserved.

Hands pressed to either side of the sink, he wept softly. It didn't matter that Crowley seemed okay with it all; was content to send his playful messages, alluding to what they had done and insinuating his desire for more. Crowley's acceptance was not the issue at hand.

 _It wasn't supposed to have_ been _like that..._

_I love Crowley, and I treated him like NOTHING._

_Less than nothing._

_Just a body. A body with which to have my way._

_And how depraved a way. How utterly void of romance, of tenderness, of care and consideration._

It wasn't love they had made. It had been sex. Pure and simple.

Aziraphale had supposed himself to be above such things. It had never been of particular interest to him in the past.

So, why? Why had he lost control of himself like that? Why did it feel as though if he _didn't_ have Crowley, and have him in that very particular, very carnal matter, did he feel as though his head would explode?

He had never known pleasure like that before. Not in all his six thousand years.

And it made him feel sick to his stomach.

A loud knock from the front door of the bookshop, broke through the jumbled fog of his thoughts and worsened his already less than venerate mood. He knew for a fact that the Closed sign was still facing the street side. How eager did a person have to be for antiquarian fair that they couldn't wait for the store to open, and took it upon themselves to rouse the owner? Surely no one was so desperately in need of a book that they negated their manners entirely?

But then, this WAS London, Aziraphale sagely reminded himself. He'd seen much ruder displays of absolute self-entitlement in the past. It never ceased to amaze just how many people forgot to say their 'pleases' and 'thankyou's'; something akin in Aziraphale's world to forgetting to open a door before stepping through it.

"For someone's sake..." The angel grumbled, feeling far from the polite and generous sort himself that morning. He mustered up as much volume as his acid burned throat was capable and bellowed out in the direction of the shop proper: "WE'RE CLOSED!"

This uncontested clarification of the store's status did not appear to register with the would be customer, because the next thing Aziraphale heard was the distinctive sound of the lock clicking over and the door being pushed open. Now they were actually resorting to breaking _into_ the store? What was _wrong_ with people? It was enough to make him almost regret having interfered with the Apocalypse, given how ungrateful and entitled most of the human race were!

"Oh, you must be joking." The Principality dried his hands, adjusted his cardigan and marched his way out through the bedroom and back into the shop. It wasn't often he felt quite as annoyed as he did, and almost pitied the poor, impertinent fool that had forced their way inside. "I SAID we're cl-"

He pulled to a stop with such gravitas that his heels near caught the Persian rug on which he was marching on fire. Standing by the doorway, was none other than Lord Beelzebub and Archangel Gabriel. Beelzebub looked every bit as annoyed as Aziraphale himself was feeling and Gabriel was currently keeping his back firmly squired against the wall, glancing about surreptitiously between shelves and attempting to casually guard the direct line to his groin. If this was not irritating enough, Beelzebub was also carrying a mostly full smoothie type drink, with a threateningly frail looking plastic lid.

"Unbelievable," Aziraphale observed, taking a moment to straighten his cardigan. It was something of a distraction from his near overwhelming desire to launch an entire bookshelf at the pair and be done with it. Gabriel did however concern him a great deal less than the enigmatic Lord Beelzebub. He'd heard Crowley's stories of the Infernal Lord's cruelty and power, and was not so put upon that he felt the need to test it. "What part of never coming here uninvited are you having so much trouble comprehending?"

"I tried to explain -" Gabriel started and then cut himself off with a full face scrunch as his eyes took in the current state of the store. For such a pompous and starchy individual, he was alarmingly expressive in so far as his facial features were concerned. "Were you robbed?"

Aziraphale took a moment in which to pin back another wave of nausea as it threatened to well up inside of him. "No. Just a little mess I need to clean up." He looked pointedly towards Beelzebub's drink; doffed with generous whirls of cream and in possession of the sort of colour what lent itself ever so well to stains. "One of which I would thank you _not_ to contribute to, by bringing drinks into the shop."

"It has a lid on it." Gabriel said, feeling strangely defensive. A need that Beelzebub plainly did not share, as they turned immediately on the spot and set the drink down on a very sturdy tabletop nearby; sans the books it may very well have served as a threat to.

"That's not important," They said, wiping condensation speckled hands off on their trouser legs. "We need to talk."

"If it is the same matter we discussed last night, my answer remains unchanged." Aziraphale said, hearing a strange, spiteful stubbornness grace his tone that he had never heard before. He took the paper towels that he had been using to clean off his books, doused the floor with a little more spray and continued with his clean-up as though the demon and the archangel were not even there. "And even if I wanted to help you, which I assure you, I do not, there is nothing either Crowley or I can do to stand against the Vices and Virtues. They're far too powerful. You might as well ask that I throw a punch at the moon for all the good it would do."

Beelzebub took a series of self-assured steps into the store that made Gabriel's eyes bulge with pre-emptive concern. "If you would just-"

"If you want my advice," Aziraphale continued as though the demon had not even spoken at all. "-why don't the two of you just rally together your respective armies and point them in the right direction? All very well and good to ask us to throw our hands upon the blade, when none of you have any intention of putting yourselves at risk!"

"Aziraphale-" Gabriel said, still firmly attached to the far wall like a gecko and having little intention of moving until he was certain as to the whereabouts of the demon Crowley.

"Frankly, I fail to see why any of this should matter to you at all!" Aziraphale said, having taken to ignoring Gabriel as well. He was scrubbing so hard at a particular spot upon the floor it was a wonder he didn't bore through the wood panelling entirely. "Last I checked, you were all in favour of the Apocalypse. I would have thought you would be overjoyed to have another shot at it!"

"Could you PLEAZE let me get a word in edgewize?" Beelzebub snapped, being in just about as foul a mood as Aziraphale himself and feeling really rather shot of being spoken down to by a low tier principality in a bow-tie and sensible shoes. It was reprimand enough to loose Aziraphale's temper entirely, and before he was even sure of what he was doing, the angel was on his feet and it was that anger what was doing the talking.

"WHY SHOULD I?!" He yelled, and it was the first time in all his long existence that Gabriel had seen such a thing. Never the better proof of Aziraphale's divorce from Heaven, then to see him so completely fly off the handle like this. "I don't owe you ANYTHING! NEITHER of you! What cheek do you have; approaching Crowley and I like this after what you did?! Why should we help you?!"

"Hold on just a moment!" The archangel said, peeling himself away from the wall and moving so as to stand at Beelzebub's shoulder. Incensed enough by Aziraphale's cheek so as to momentarily forget his consternations. "You committed multiple acts of treason against Heaven! Over thousands of years! You consorted with the enemy! Given the circumstances, we acted appropriately!"

"You never even gave me a trial!" The Principality shot back. He had not been actually there, of course, but Crowley had spared no details. "You never bothered to ask yourself as to _why_ I did what I did! You left me here alone for six thousand years, and you wonder why I became attached to it? This is my home!" He jabbed a finger towards the floor of the bookshop as some indication as to what 'home' he was referring. It was a dramatic gesture, hardly needed yet unconsciously executed. "No one could possibly understand what it was like, except for Crowley! Of course we were drawn to each other! What else could we have done?!"

"Your duty, of course! Where is your loyalty?" Gabriel pointed a finger at him; in a manner what was somehow more chiding than it was threatening, and served only to infuriate Aziraphale more. "You not only betrayed Heaven with your actions, but God Herself! Did you ever stop to think about that?"

"Don't you even start in on him about loyalty." Beelzebub said sourly. "You are the lazt person who should be caszting stonez."

Gabriel gabbled like a turkey choking on a too large piece of poultry feed. "But, he with the- What does that- _How_ have I become the bad guy, here?!"

"Enough." Beelzebub sighed, rubbing the tips of their fingers briefly to the knot that had formed between their brows. "This iz getting us nowhere."

"Well, his attitude is not helping." Gabriel petulantly grumbled. Like a chastised teenager, who still wished to somehow deflect blame for a misdemeanour he'd had every part in perpetuating.

"Well, if my attitude bothers you, you know where the door is." Aziraphale waved a hand airily towards the shop entryway. "The very same one that you invited yourself through against my express wishes, nonetheless..."

"I should think you would _want_ to help!" Gabriel exclaimed, breaching a level of frustration of which he had never before been acquainted. He had known Aziraphale to be stubborn, but this outright refusal to even _listen_ to what they were saying struck him as being intensely... childish. Of course he had a very limited perspective as to what being childish actually _was,_ but from what little he could glean from his earth based observations, Aziraphale was currently doing a very apt impression. "If not us, then at the very least to protect this infernal rock you're so attached to!"

"Yes, while we're on the subject, I'm curious to know just why you're so interested in throwing a spanner in the works this time around." Aziraphale said, setting the roll of paper towel and the spray and wipe bottle back by the register, before turning to the intrusive pair with a confused expression upon his face. "Don't you want your silly war?"

The silence what answered him was as deafening as it was telling. Gabriel and Beelzebub exchanged slow, pointed glances and it was more than enough evidence for Aziraphale to pull the pieces into alignment.

"I see... so there IS no war." He said. His eyes widened as it all 'clicked'; all made sudden and dreadful sense. " _That's_ why Heaven and Hell are so bent out of shape. You've not been given the opportunity to settle things."

"That iz part of the reazon, yes." Beelzebub said, stepping closer to the angel. Their expression was always a particularly serious one, but there was something much more purposeful about it now. A sort of... vulnerability what was so slight, you might never have gleaned it from a human face. "But the truth iz far the more complicated than that."

"Beelzebub... be careful how much you say." Gabriel warned. "The contract is still in effect."

"To Heaven with it." Beelzebub snapped. "We don't have the luxury of beating around the bush any longer. Besides... he's not wrong." They turned back towards Aziraphale and nodded at him in something of an approving manner. "Why should we be asking them to put themselvez at risk when we are not prepared to do so ourselvez?"

Their convictions, once wavering, were now as solid and unyielding in their foundations as a steel pole rooted into dry concrete. There was no other way around this, nor should there be. What they were asking required a great deal of personal risk and sacrifice, and Beelzebub had never been the sort of creature what would ask of others that which they were unprepared to do themselves. It was not a matter as to whether such a thing was considered 'fair' or not, it was merely a representation of commitment. And a demon like them had not gotten so far as they had, by being a snivelling, weaselly coward.

"The end is coming." They said, aware as they did that the contract what pertained to them was now broken. "Not juzt the end of the world, but the end of everything."

"Everything?" Aziraphale asked, softly. This had certainly gotten his attention. Some of the anger ebbed away.

"Everything." The demon confirmed. Their eyes cold and clinical and more the convincing on account of it. "Heaven, Hell, the universe, all of it. All will be weighed, and ALL," They said, with great and terrible clarity. "Will be judged."

Silence at long last fell upon the bookshop. After some moments spent in quiet reflection of this sobering prospect, Aziraphale swallowed back the rather large lump what had formed in his throat and gestured, distractedly, towards the rear of the shop.

"Perhaps you, uh... had best come and... sit down."

Beelzebub retrieved their drink first. It wasn't the sort of drink they felt they were in need of, but it was something in the way of a distraction.

Gabriel accepted a fingers width of exceptionally watered down single malt. A bad idea, perhaps, but he felt he had need of it.

Not a one of them cared for the hour of the day. It was 5 o'clock somewhere. And the penultimate end of the known universe was not the sort of thing one faced sober.

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you as always for joining me, my dear lovely readers! Next time, Aziraphale considers Beelzebub's proposal, morning after stuff continues to get more awkward and Gabriel makes a big decision about his future.
> 
> Take care of yourselves out there in the big wide world, everybody! And by 'take care of yourselves' I mean stay at home, those of you who can. Be safe, wash your hands, all that hootenanny. Hoping to see you all back in the next chapter!
> 
> All my love,  
> ~MadamMortis~ xxx ooo


	59. Or, in which an Archangel throws his halo into the ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wasn't that 30th year Anniversary special just lovely, folks? And such a strong message to send in such difficult times as this. The sad, though much necessary reminder that we are all making sacrifices for the greater good. In spite of their wanting to be together, even Aziraphale and Crowley are setting the right example.
> 
> Aziraphale becoming an expert baker kind of casts shade on my headcanon of his being an abysmal cook, however! But then I think to myself; well, needs must as the devil drives, and all. And an Aziraphale that is desperate for something sweet to eat would be capable of learning, nothing surer! He's a very stubborn creature, as we've seen and once he sets his mind to something he's very hard to redirect!
> 
> As usual, thank you to everyone who took the time to read, kudos and to comment! You guys are wonderful :) I hope you are enjoying the story so far, and if you have any thoughts about it, I would love to hear them!
> 
> That being said, let's crack open a new chapter, shall we? I sadly did not get quite as much included as I had initially planned, and as such, Aziraphale and Crowley don't get around to having their chat until the next chapter. I hope you enjoy the update anyway and I shall see you on the far side!
> 
> Warnings: Just some for foul language, mainly towards the end.

* * *

_**~Sunday - 28th of April, 8:57 am~** _   
_**A.Z Fell & Co's** _

_**Nine months to the Apex...** _

"When you say... the end of _everything?"_

"Juzt as I said," Beelzebub set their drink down on the table; eschewing the coaster that Aziraphale had rather pointedly placed at their convenience. They either ignored, or failed to notice the distinct twitching of the nerve what had peaked beneath the Principalities neatly sculptured brow. "They're calling it the contingency plan. The plan came into effect after the firszt Apocalypse failed. Culminating in an event they are referring to az the Apex; in which all soulz will be balanced, judged and then divided down the middle. " They settled back into the corner settee, taking a sniff and wrinkling their nose at the distinctly Crowley like scent what annointed the furniture. Further proof, of just how many long years their former agent had been spending in the company of his assumed enemy. "According to the documentation we received, the Apex iz due to occur on the 2nd of February, 2020. The Vicez and the Virtue'z have been put in charge of instigating the plan, with express instructionz that neither Heaven nor Hell are to take any steps so as to either inhibit their actions, or influence them."

"That's what it said?" Aziraphale asked, being very particular about his wording. He sat in his study chair, though without any of the obvious ease he exhibited whence in the company of Crowley. His back felt about as straight, and as rigid as a Westcott ruler, and the otherwise appreciated single malt in his glass was doing little to ease his nerves.

"That's what we inferred." Gabriel said, speaking up for the first time in some minutes. He had chosen to remain standing, though kept his back firmly pressed to one of the neighbouring bookcases, as though preparing to charge an imagined foe on the far side of it at any moment. "The instructions were delivered to us two months ago, but the plan itself was formulated in 5008 BCE."

Aziraphale noticed Beelzebub turning their head just enough to gift the archangel with a look. To say that it was anything obvious and perceptible would be lending too much credence to a creature what was as deliberately subtle as the Lord of the Infernal regions. It was there all the same, and telling enough for what it was.

"There's no need for you-" Was the formation of their protest, and one what was swiftly disbanded by means of a verbal fireman's hose.

"There's every need." Gabriel said, simply and with a meaningful glance at his historical counterpart. It was a look Aziraphale had not seen for some time, and was rather ashamedly curious to bear witness.

His intrigue was swiftly obliterated by the demon's earlier words; a startling indictment of too many questions what couldn't possibly possess answers. Too many implications what could only be considered abominable if one were to take them as fact.

"5008 BCE..." Aziraphale mused. He felt the lines of his face take weight from his thoughts, and bow obediently beneath them. "But that's... _long_ before the rebellion took place."

"Precisely." Gabriel said, stepping away from the bookshelf. Caught up in the tidal grip of the conversation. Looking contrarily lighter in his divulging of the facts; facts what pressed all the heavier upon Aziraphale's own mind. "The Contingency plan not only spoke of the rebellion and the failed apocalypse but mentioned each of the Fallen angels by name."

"The namez that were given to us by Satan himself. Post damnation." Beelzebub further clarified. If, in case, Aziraphale was half the half-wit they had been led to believe. In so saying, the predominant source of that impression had been supplied by Crowley himself, and this was a demon with an obviously vested interest in leading Hell astray by the collar.

The Lord of the Infernal regions silently professed themselves satisfied (for to be impressed would be far too much of a concession) to see the Principality's eyes shift from side to side in their sockets; his eyebrows pressed down to form a heavy porch above them. A very human demonstration of nutting out the facts.

"Which would suggest then that God Herself has something of a prophetic capability. Just like Agnes Nutter. Something of which we have quietly supposed, but had no real proof." He said, and Beelzebub felt a sensation what was somewhat akin to... pride. Why they should feel proud of this random nobody angel they couldn't say, nor could they justify how wonderfully refreshing it was to wander up on a Celestial what was prepared to think outside the box. "If we are to assume that such a thing is true, then why?" Aziraphale looked up at them, something urgent and needed taking form in the green of his charitable eyes. "Why allow it all to play out? Why the wars? Why _any_ of the wars? Why one failed apocalypse? Why a... what did you call it? A contingency plan?"

"These are the question's we have all been asking ourselves, Aziraphale." Gabriel said, and the principality could have damn near fallen out of his chair to hear of the glorious archangel himself questioning _anything._ This was a creature notorious for being wound tighter than the strings of a sexually repressed mandolin. "How did the Almighty know that half of Heaven would rebel? How did She know that the Great Plan would fail? How would she know the names of the fallen? And why, if She did, would She not have advised us? Supported us?" He gestured towards Beelzebub. "All of us?"

"It's impossible." Aziraphale mumbled, wanting more than anything for that to be the truth of the matter. Feeling very petty and small and ignorant for wanting to believe it. Feeling even more odd and ridiculous for still being intensely bothered and reminded about what had happened between he and Crowley the night before.

"Impossible?" Beelzebub asked, reaching over to pluck up their drink from the table and leaving behind a fractured semi-circle of condensation for Aziraphale to have to sponge up later. "Or intentional?"

They took a loud slurp of their drink, what was the only sound to fill the sobering silence what followed. The insinuation hung heavy in the air; like the net of a deep sea trawler preparing to drop its flapping, odorous load all over the slimy deck beneath it. Gabriel looked particularly troubled by the suggestion, and Aziraphale; though having been discharged from active duty, did not feel as much removed from the horrifying insinuation as he would otherwise prefer. A sidestep from Heaven was not a divorce from the Lord Herself. A Lord whom he still loved, and trusted and to whom he readily distilled the essence of his faith.

The very idea that it was _She_ ; not the angels of Heaven, nor the demons of Hell, who might serve as the... someone help him- _enemy_ was... overwhelming to say the least. He could now properly appreciate just how someone as steadfast as Gabriel had come to find himself in this situation. How he had conceded to consort with his once greater love; the then source of his ultimate betrayal. Precious little, aside from the most concrete of proof, could have brought him to this.

"And you... also believe this?" Aziraphale asked the archangel. The verbal clarification was necessary, though the look on his former line manager's face was somewhat enough of an indicator. If there was an expression more suited to describing a person what had just been pushed out the open door of a plane by the person that they loved, it had yet to be invented.

Gabriel looked towards Beelzebub, and the Principality felt a hard edge soften in his chest. For in the archangel's gaze was something of the camaraderie and the companionship he had so often witnessed in Crowley's, and such an extension spoke volumes.

"I would not be asking questions," Gabriel said, the grief running on an intravenous drip though his words. "If I was not in possession of doubts."

"What does your speaking to me entail?" Aziraphale asked, jolting Beelzebub up and out of themselves. Though they hadn't appeared especially moved by Gabriel's gesture, this was not to suggest that something had not shifted on a subterranean level. The demon was much like a continental plate; only with a far less expressive outcome upon the surface.

"That dependz," They sipped once more from the contents of their drink, before then setting it down just off centre of the condensation ring they had previously made. "Dagon tellz me you had a visitor last night. One of the Contingency team. Which one waz it and how much do they know?"

Aziraphale somehow sat up straighter in his seat and to such an unnatural degree that even a theoretical physicist would have struggled to work out the theory behind the act.

"Have you been spying on me?!" He asked, wondering even as he did why he went to the effort of finding the prospect a surprising one. Given the way in which he and Crowley had exited their former employment, it would have been far the more shocking to discover that Heaven and Hell had _not_ in fact been keeping tabs on them. Leaving them alone was one thing. Leaving them unsupervised, was another.

Gabriel pushed air out from between his teeth; looking about as awkward as a pre-teen confessing his love to a crush what was significantly more popular and less pockmarked than he was. "I wouldn't go so far as to say we were 'spying'..."

"I would." Beelzebub said, unashamed of such a thing for obvious reasons. "Yes, we were spying on you."

"I see." Aziraphale said, painstakingly combing through the details of the past couple of months and wondering just how much Heaven and Hell had been made privy to. It gave him a horrible dirty feeling; like being touched on the rear end whilst standing on a crowded bus. As though something had been taken from him without consent. "And just how... much have you been spying?"

"A few hourz." Beelzebub said, to which the Principality felt both relieved and confused. A few... _hours?_ After how many months of their being discharged and left to wander the earth at their leisure? "Prior to your leaving the bookshop, culminating before your return. Aside from the Virtue, Dagon discerned nothing of any particular interest."

"Yes, well. I suppose that's something, at least." Aziraphale murmured. There had been quite a few things of 'interest' which had occurred the previous evening in the bookshop; one of which had transpired on the very settee in which Lord Beelzebub was currently lounging like a feudal Lord. It offered Aziraphale precious little reassurance. Those matters of which he considered to be of interest, were more the likely considered irrelevant by Heaven and Hell and as such, not worth mentioning. This wasn't to say that they hadn't however been observed.

"Az for the Virtue in question?" Beelzebub pressed. Though their demeanour suggested that they were at ease, the subtle shifting of their eyes in their sockets said that they were wary of hanging around too long.

"It was Humanitas. We have been on good terms since the beginning." Aziraphale took a sip from his own glass, remembering his consternations from the previous night and being all too aware as to how the following information was going to be received. "He knows that... Crowley and I have been discharged."

Gabriel and Beelzebub looked as though they had been struck square in the face with a copy of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Eyes wide, they stared at one another, shifted from side to side. Glanced towards the windows, as though expecting the swift hand of retribution to come sweeping through the glass and snare them by the throats.

"But I don't believe he will tell the others." Aziraphale said, finding it strange that he felt in any way responsible for assuaging their fears. They themselves had not been so courteous in the past. "He is fond of us."

"Fondness only goez so far." Beelzebub said, as curt and as practical as ever. Fondness was to them, a foreign, intangible concept after all. "Do not forget that he haz a contract. To see out the end of existence. If he ever comez to believe that you or Crowley may jeapordize that-"

"Well, they will all know eventually, surely?" Aziraphale could be practical too, when the situation called for it. "But for now, is there any means for them to suspect that you may have broken your contract?"

"There were the two at the bar last night..." Gabriel murmured, tapping his index finger indolently against the side of his glass. The contents were already halfway drained, which shocked Aziraphale somewhat. He had never known Gabriel to imbibe, not in all the thousands of years the archangel had deigned to step foot on earth. A definitive sign, if anything, that things were out of balance.

"Yes, they spoke to us. They believe we are still in the employ of our respective agencies. And having a clandestine affair."

"That'z something at least." Beelzebub sniffed. Seeming as indifferent about the particulars of Aziraphale and Crowley's relationship as they had been the previous night. It made Aziraphale unexpectedly warm to them, though he could have never supposed such a thing possible; given how they had treated 'Crowley' at the time of his would be execution. At the very least they were straight forward and sensible and solutions focused. Far removed from the very contrary and ironic vindictiveness displayed by the choirs of Heaven.

"Are you in danger?" Aziraphale asked, and surprised himself in the modicum of genuine concern he felt. Directed more so at the fallen angel, than their Heavenly associate.

"No more than you are." Beelzebub replied. Rather the bluntly, which was somehow more reassuring in just how matter-of-fact they were. "But if we are to have any chance of successfully intervening, we need more than juzt you and Crowley. Your immunity to hellfire and holy water makes you an integral component to our plan, but my powerz far outweigh your own." They took up their drink, swivelling the plastic straw in the jagged mouth of the cup, causing it to squeak unpleasantly. "You're going to need support."

Aziraphale set his glass down on the study desk; firmly enough to splash the remaining snifter of single malt up towards the rim. "Just a moment," He said, lifting the hand that was now free. "You're still talking as though our support is an assured thing. We haven't yet agreed to anything."

"We would not expect you to involve yourselvez without proper remuneration." Beelzebub replied, giving Aziraphale a sort of scolding look as if to suggest he had insulted them with his assumption. "In exchange for your assistance, we are offering you immunity."

This was enough to make the Principalities ears prick up. "Immunity?"

"You will be free to live your lives on earth without further fear of reprisal." Gabriel clarified, pausing just long enough to take a considerably deep draught from his drink. Aziraphale questioned the sensibility of it, given that the archangel was hardly practiced with it. "If we manage to avert the plan, you will be left alone. Neither Heaven nor Hell will come after you."

"Furthermore, we are prepared to restore your earthly bodiez in the event of your being discorporated." Beelzebub added, looking about as pleased by the offer as a beachcomber is pleased with having a bullant trapped in their crocks. "Az many timez az required."

"For a small fee." Gabriel grunted as a book flipped itself off of the shelf nearest him and indented its sharp corner into his solar plexus. Beelzebub gave him a warning look from behind the finger they had just flicked in his direction. "Free of charge." The archangel croaked.

"I see," Aziraphale said, not without some small trace of irony. It would seem that Heaven and Hell knew precisely what sort of bait to use when they went fishing. "An offer that is hard to resist."

"And we know how easily you yield to temptation." Gabriel felt the need to add. He didn't look at all happy with the conditions; evidenced by an expression most akin to a two year old child being force fed a Brussel sprout. Yet another factor of which Aziraphale could only afford genuine respect. At least the archangel had the good sense not to be smarmy and insincere about it all.

"You have a funny way of asking for help." Aziraphale took a sip from his drink and held the liquid a moment upon his tongue. The offer was genuinely appealing and all too relevant, given what he and Crowley had been discussing the past couple of weeks. The extra care that they were forced to exercise; given the increased risk of their being discorporated and what this would ultimately mean should their spiritual bodies return to Heaven and Hell.

What Gabriel and Beelzebub were offering was much needed security; a means of them being able to get on with their lives without the added concern of eternal obliteration. The question begged however; was this in any way worth the risk what came from standing in opposition to the Vice's and Virtue's? He and Crowley might not perhaps live long enough to enjoy their reward.

Not that any of them were likely to live long if the Apex were to occur.

"I will consider it." Aziraphale set down his glass and raised a finger before either Gabriel and Beelzebub could jump in. "But first, I want you to draft up an ironclad contract. If Crowley and I are satisfied by the conditions, we _may_ choose to sign it."

Beelzebub nodded, seeming to find Aziraphale's condition a reasonable one. Not that they had much in the way of wiggle room when it came to negotiations, but it was still a decent show on their part. "I shall have Dagon draw something up."

"I'll ask Uriel to collaborate." Gabriel concurred, throwing back the last remaining dribble from the base of his glass and sending a chunk of ice bouncing off of his upper lip and onto the floor. To his credit, he did start immediately searching for it; which was far the more consideration than Aziraphale supposed him to be in possession of.

"So, you'll be in touch."

Beelzebub rose from their seat, taking up their plastic cup in the same Lazarus-like gesture. "I'm going to take up temporary station on earth whilzt we address the matter." They said, taking a moment to ensure that their slacks were inappropriately wrinkled. "Once I have acquired a place of residence, I will contact you with the information."

"Understood." Aziraphale staggered up onto his feet, overcome by the somewhat bizarre urge to offer his hand to the Lord of the Infernal regions. He resisted at the last moment, feeling it far too much in the way of a clinched agreement and a gesture that Beelzebub would more the likely have not appreciated. Not every demon was as friendly as Crowley, and that in itself was saying something.

Beelzebub finalized their impromptu meeting with but a sniff and a glance what by their own reckoning was worlds more sentimental than they might have otherwise preferred. They turned and made their way towards the front door of the bookshop, taking stock out the adjacent windows beforehand. Gabriel dithered a moment longer, setting his glass down on the shelf nearest him before turning to Aziraphale with a somewhat awkward expression. One which crumpled into a frown, like a paper bag left out in the rain too long.

"Did you... change your hair?" He asked, continuing to stare at Aziraphale as though he had done something as inconsiderate as turning into a frog. The Principality went so far as to touch his fingertips to the crown of his head, checking to see whether anything was noticeably amiss.

"Not since 38 AD."

Gabriel continued to look unconvinced. "You look different..." He said, taking a sniff of the air. His senses were not nearly so refined as Sandolphon's; who, as a Seraphim, had far the more accelerated earthly senses, but his was a nose far the more sensitive than that in possession of a human being. And something about the bookshop, about Aziraphale specifically smelt... different. Altered, somehow. Nothing distinct, nothing of which could be described in any way by words. Only if one were to say that there was a discernible... difference.

Aziraphale was staring back at him; one brow crinkled in like one of those potato chips everyone avoids, because it's far too difficult to lick the seasoning off of and it may dig into the exposed nerve of your tooth whence eating it. The Principality had noticed something rather the strange about his once superior as well; far the more than just his unusually clement interactions with Lord Beelzebub. A shift in his energy... a... _shift_ in general.

"So do you, come to think of it." He murmured, staring from the corner of his eyes as though awaiting some manner of explanation. They remained in stalemate as such for some time yet, until the tensile cord what held them connected to one another was sliced down the middle. The both of them tentatively aware as to just what it was about them that had changed, and both being all too intensely embarrassed and unsettled by it.

"Talk soon." Gabriel said, grinning ridiculously as he attempted to back out of the study area; nearly taking out one of the bookshelves in his retreat.

"Yes." Aziraphale responded, aware that the smile on his face was altogether too much like the one he had been hoping to have dispensed with now that his employment to Heaven had been rescinded. That ever so false, placating and anxiety fuelled smile which spoke of the games he was playing, and the truth's that he was twisting and the secrets that he was hiding. Leaving Heaven behind had been liberating for him. The thought of being suckered back into that world, lent a far deeper ache to his chest than that which had comfortably settled there throughout the morning.

He didn't want this. It was all too much. Too much, too soon.

And there was nothing at all to be done about it.

"Fuck." The angel said, and quietly relished in the small ounce of freedom that the curse permitted him.

* * *

_**~London Soho - 9:15am...** _

"You didn't have to do that."

"Do what?" Gabriel asked, struggling as always to keep up with Beelzebub as they speared their way through the bustling Londonites with the steadfast conviction of an air to earth missile. How they continually managed to oustrip him when their entire body was the same height as one of his own legs, never ceased to confuse the archangel.

"Screw yourself over, that'z what." The Lord of the Infernal regions slurped belligerently from their drink, shoving aside an elderly woman with a walking frame who had inconsiderately impeded upon their progress through the intersection.

"What, I'm supposed to let you just go it alone?"

"Why not?" Beelzebub snapped. They thought themselves rather merciful in not turning about and pitching their drink into the ridiculous archangel's face again. What an insult, to even _play_ at such ignorance! "Been all right for the last six thousand yearz. What'z changed?"

"You know what's changed." Gabriel said. His human body was fit, and he had worked hard to keep it that way. He was grateful for it then, being able to push himself into a jog that brought him into Lord Beelzebub's flurried path. Though they didn't appear at all pleased in his stopping them, they nonetheless brought themselves up short and stood there; bottom lip pinched between their teeth and eyes cast imperiously off to the side. "Look... I... I know I can never make up for what's happened. For what I've done. But I'm here now." Gabriel set a hand to the broad, muscular expanse of his chest. The human heart what dwelt within was jumping a million miles a moment. Sense and practicality had gone out the window long before now, and the emotions what ran roughshot within his mortal condition were well and truly in control. "We're on the same side. And I am not going to let you take the fall again."

Beelzebub stared at him; quietly and ashamedly taken aback by the archangel's words. They weren't at all sure what to say. Pompous and self-righteous though Gabriel was, he had never imagination enough to be a liar. There was nothing at all to gain from his saying these things... nothing in the least.

Why then was he saying them?

Why had he, as the Principality had put it, thrown his hand upon the blade?

"So..." The archangel said, clapping said hands together before then extending them out to either side of himself. Gesturing to the wider expanse of the London region. "Where are we going to set up our base of operations?"

 _Are you really doing this?_ Have _you really done this?_

_You can't go back to Heaven now. You're stuck here. On earth._

_With me._

"WE are not doing anything." Beelzebub stated, still staring at Gabriel as though expecting fire to erupt from the top of his brill-creamed head at any given moment. Did the idiot even fully comprehend what he had done? What he had sentenced himself to?

_I've done this before. I know what it's like. I have tasted rebellion, and bathed in the acid stench of damnation. You are a child, wide eyed and gawping; reaching out with your sticky fingers in the hopes that someone will take them and guide you out of the dark._

_Knowing how I feel about you... what torment you condemned me to... how can you trust that I will reach through the shadow to you?_

_A fool. A blessed, absurd, ridiculous fool..._

"Yes, we are." Gabriel said. He set his hands together; lilac coloured eyes seeming denser all of a sudden. Possessed of some innate weight, some anchorage.

_Aziraphale turned his back on Heaven for the person he loved. For the world that he loves._

_Not so many hours ago, such a prospect struck me as absurd._

_And here I am, doing the exact same thing._

_And barely thinking a thing of it._

"The dye is cast, there's no going back now." The archangel said, and was more the certain by the moment that he had made the right choice. He thought he had known peace in his Heavenly existence, but nothing he had ever done in all his thousands of years, no decision he had ever made, rested quite so easily within his soul. "We're in this together."

"More'z the pity." The demon replied. They sniffed, for they really didn't know what else to do and went to take another sip from their drink. Couldn't yet do it; for the lump in their throat made the action impossible. "We can't stay in one place too long." They said. Talking at least, gave them some path out of their own tangled knot of a mind. "That'll give the Contingency Team time to catch up to uz. Our bezt chance is to keep moving between domicilez. Change the name on that bank card between transactionz. Miracle up bank accounts in correspondence. Nothing that can actually be traced back to a human financial institution or whatever."

"Makes sense." Gabriel said, with a somewhat crooked smile. One that made him appear almost... pleased. Tentatively so, but an expression that was by far the more genuine than most any Beelzebub had borne witness to in recent times. "We should probably book into a new... hotel?" He waited until the demon had nodded; assuring him that he had gotten the word correct. "Tonight, then?"

"Makes sense." Beelzebub replied, quietly grateful that they had a reason not to spend another night in that _deshamble_ that was the _Sunny Sanctum Hotel._ Never mind the memories of the previous evening, but the entire hotel seemed to reek of perspective bedbugs, genital sores and disenfranchised odours. They would be glad not to be forced to grind out another night in a place what made even Hell look hospitable and hygienic by comparison. "Give me your card. I'll go and make a booking for uz for tonight. I'll send the details to your Cele-phone once I'm done."

Gabriel handed over his bank card without a seconds thought. It seemed a very much expected thing these days. "Um... if I may? Try and get something where the drinks in the mini-bar are the proper size, yes? Not those teeny tiny little things."

"You're in idiot." Beelzebub said. They took the card, peeled back the fraying flap of their carry bag and slipped it into an inside pocket. "Meet me at the new hotel at 6pm. That'll give me time to make arrangementz and to confer with the rest of the council. Satan only knowz what they're going to make of all this..."

Gabriel nodded in a somewhat expectantly understanding manner. He was, after all, in the same situation as them. "I'll speak with my colleagues and let them know what's going on."

Beelzebub nodded. For once in their long life, they didn't know what to say. Gabriel had always been the most fastidious, rule abiding, structure oriented individual they had ever known. So much so, that seven thousand years prior, they had shelved the incontestable love they had felt for the angel what had been Raphael and thrown them into the ring of fire with nary a backwards glance. There was nothing more important to Gabriel than the abidance of God's will. To cast that aside and throw his lot in with the 'enemy'...

It had to have been more than just self-preservation. Gabriel had care enough for his own existence, this was true, but he had always placed it secondary to his higher mission. One would not go so far as to suggest that this was by any means a noble sentiment, but something what was hardwired into the very core of his being. Though not a military instalment, you would be hard pressed to find any creature alive that walked the line with more regimented determination than Gabriel.

There were a means of doing things, and that was that. They were God's means, and the designs and declarations of the Almighty was all the assurance Gabriel needed so as to inform his decisions. Be they considerations of the immortal soul, to anything so contrary as the colour tie he might chose to don whence adopting his earth bound persona.

Something had to have shifted at a vastly tectonic level to so drastically alter the landscape what comprised the archangel's personality (menial though it was). Beelzebub wasn't at all sure what to make of it. What to think of it. Whether to think of it too deeply at all.

"Thank you." They said at last, feeling something altogether strange and unfamiliar tug at the corners of their face; pulling it down towards a mouth that was similarly surrendering to the benighted grip of gravity. Whatever it was, they knew for certain that they did not like it and fought back against the traitorous plasticine like proponents of their expression, so that they rested as nonchalant and as unconcerned as ever.

They could tell that they had been in no way fast enough. Gabriel's own face took on an interesting amalgamation betwixt softness and determination and he leaned in, cupping both hands tenderly to each of Beelzebub's narrow shoulders. He knelt a little, something that the demon naturally resented and looked them square and somewhat disconcertingly in the eyes.

"Six pm. I'll be there." He squeezed their shoulders, gave that familiar toothy grin before then turning on his heel and near falling into the hooves of a passing horse and carriage. "I'll be there!"

Beelzebub watched as the ludicrous oaf bumbled his way through the traffic to the walkway of the adjacent side. He waved to them, unaware of just how embarrassing a gesture it was. Like a teenager eagerly anticipating a first date with the person of their dreams. The Lord of the Infernal regions did not of course bother to return the gesture, but slucked deeply from the frosty flotsam of their beverage before turning and making their way down the street. They would need to find an alternative hotel for the both of them to set up shop. That was more than enough thinking to be getting on with.

They did their best to ignore the small, granule fine speck of hope what had started to refract long forgotten light within their chest. Nursing such fragile expectations was only searching for trouble. They would much sooner quash it from existence than run the risk of entertaining it.

And yet, like the smallest of splinters it lingered. A stinging spot beneath the skin; just out of reach. Persistent, irreconcilable and portent with the reminder of its presence.

* * *

_**~London Soho - 9:28am~** _

_**Some filthy alley...** _

Gabriel took himself off of the street, away from the curious eyes of humans who more the likely didn't give a flying rats proverbial as to what he was doing in the first place. Wouldn't do to become complacent, however.

He was aware that he was smiling. More to the point, he was aware as to the reason _why_ he was smiling. And it seemed a strange thing to him, that he could be smiling now of all times.

_What the hell was he doing? Defying God's divine plan, opposing Her will? A will that he was predisposed, was designed to not just trust in but to abide by? Without question, without falter._

And for what purpose?

This wasn't just about preventing the Apex. Gabriel had wanted his war once upon a time, this was true.

Things had changed.

Not just in the previous night, but in the months preceding it. The contingency plan had forced him into initially reluctant alignment with the one person he had ever truly felt close to. The only person he had ever grown to love. Not one who he was predisposed to love, such as God. This affectation was as much a part of him as the human nose was upon his human skull.

What he had felt for Raphael in those days... what they had shared... it was something they had created, the two of them. Something fashioned and nurtured and nourished. He couldn't have imagined such a thing ever again being possible, let alone with the very same person who had once betrayed him.

Who... _he_ had betrayed.

 _It was_ I _who betrayed_ you.

That was the irrefutable and utterly definitive difference in all of this. The core that served as the spawning point of all that change. Beelzebub had changed in so many ways since the time of their Fall (was Fall even the right word, all things considered?) but the very essence of who they were, who they had been and what they would become was a soul that could not be sullied. The sulphur had not changed who they were; not the truest most essence of their truest most self. The corruptive, malignant energy of the Vice's void had not been able to penetrate far enough into that wondrous, indefinable soul so as to violently twist the tender root.

They were, as they had always been; determined, brilliant, fierce and practical. Prepared to step up and do whatever it was that was required, whether it put them at risk or not. How it had impressed Gabriel to see them throw their atypically gaudy hat into the ring, all for respect of giving just as much as what was being asked.

It was not a demonic trait. It was not even an angelic one, not really.

It was one that was wholly and undeniably _them._ Raphael, Beelzebub, the entire sum of their parts; whatever these parts ascribed to. And it was these parts that Gabriel had found himself falling in love with all over again.

Those parts which were neither black, nor white but simply and compellingly, Beelzebub.

That was why he smiled, and wanted to laugh for how utterly ludicrous the whole situation was. How he was going to even begin to explain this to his angelic cohorts, he hadn't a clue. How any of this was going to work out when and _if_ they were able to subvert the Apex, he didn't know. What would his enlightenment, his epiphany's matter, if the Great War was once again back on the cards? How would any sort of future be possible, if he had so completely fallen from the grace of the God to whom he had entrusted near every aspect of his eternal spirit?

It was Aziraphale and Crowley who, most ironically, gave him hope. Here they both were, after all. God had not sought them out of Her own accord. She had given no direct instructions to Heaven as to how and whether or not they should in fact, be dealt with. The Lord of all Creation had in fact fallen silent as of late. Even the Metatron conveyed nothing of her Word. The angel what had defied the Great Plan, had defied Heaven and the choir of its hosts, had been left to his own devices. Left to dally upon the earth with the demon he had come to care for. Come to love.

 _Surely there is room for me to move. I have been loyal, and true and steadfast all these thousands of years,_ Gabriel thought, his eye alighting to something what glittered alluringly from the alleyway floor. He knelt, eyes squinted so as to bring it into focus against the backdrop of the morning sun. _I have loved Beelzebub in the time before the Fall and have perhaps come to love them again._

_I must set things to right._

_I must... do... right... by them._

_Not just you, my Lord._

_Not just you._

The glimmer turned out to be a one pound coin; set perfectly symmetrical to the entry of the alley. Gabriel wasn't much in the need of money, but he nonetheless felt compelled to reach out and pluck it away from the filthy concrete. Something of a metaphor in his own suddenly philosophical mind, perhaps.

The coin did not move. It appeared to be stuck to the concrete by something unseen. Try as he might, Gabriel could not pry the thing away with any amount of force from his human fingers.

He might have gone so far as to use magic to have achieved his goal, but something stopped him. That something coming in the form of a strong hand clutching the thick, neatly combed hair on the back of his head. He let out a gasp, having never been in a situation like this before and briefly wondering as to whether he should turn out the insides of his designer pockets, before that same hand drove him forwards, smacking his face into the ground with such force that the coin was dislodged; finding point of purchase in the centre of his forehead.

Gabriel's vision fractured into a thousand dancing dots; each bleeding out to form a strange kaleidoscope of branches across his vision. This was nothing however for him to ponder upon, for his thoughts were just as fractured as the landscape of his mind and he passed as quickly and neatly into unconsciousness as a celebrity bypasses nationally imposed pandemic restrictions all for want of attending the gym.

"So sorry, dear chap," Humanitas said, the fingers what he had just set to the back of Gabriel's head now anxiously grooming down either side of his greying moustache. "It's for the greater good. You understand."

The Virtue of Kindness knelt. Wings of white and wings of black extended both and blanketed the buckled form of the archangel. A glimmer of dissonance that would have gone unnoticed by the passing throngs and then, with but one dissonant feather falling astray, the pair had vanished from sight.

A glittering coin hung suspended a moment, reflected a wink of the late morning light and dropped to the alleyway floor with a dull ting before then rolling out into the bordering side walk.

A young lass happened upon it and was quite pleased for the change in her good fortune.

* * *

_**Sunday 28th of April - 12:34pm** _

_**The town of Slough...** _

Vincent Davies (Vinnie to his mates) was having, in what he might have referred to in his more eloquent of moments, 'a shit cunt of a day.'

Things had started out okay. He'd been drinking for most of the morning, having started at the more than reasonable hour of 'nine thirty-ish' and had so far managed to stow away the better part of a twenty-four can slab. Which was a modest amount for him, all things considered. He would have still been chipping away at his six pack, if the missus hadn't started bellowing at him to go out and pick something up for lunch. The fact that he was twenty sheets to the wind mattered precious little where Audrey Caruther's was concerned. She'd been hitting the sauce just as hard and wanted a free half hour to suck back a spliff without their five year old Jax underfoot.

With much grumbling and swearing to be had, Vinnie had reluctantly bundled the grubby, snot speckled fruit of his loins into the back of his truck and driven twenty minutes to the local fish and chip shop. The tires had remained mostly on the road during the trip. Jax was in the back seat; inadequately belted into the frayed and faded fabric and staring straight ahead with the unsettling, bug eyed countenance of a child who is so accustomed to existing in the perpetual state of near-death that they have become desensitized to it.

Vinne drank another can on the way to the fish shop, casting the empty shell into the cluttered space beneath his dashboard when he was done and immediately foisted a replacement into his hand. He flicked back the ring tab with a practiced index finger, brought the beer to his lips and slucked back on the lukewarm foam what jolted up into his mouth. The process of which caused him to swerve momentarily into the far lane of traffic before he brought the utility begrudgingly back to the left hand side of the road. It was fine. There was no one else around. Not a copper to be seen for miles. He'd been caught plenty of times, sure but nothing ever stuck. A fine here and there, a warning, a court appearance. Couple of months in the slammer. That was just life, innit? He wasn't no middle classed twat with a V-neck pullover and a country club membership. That was other people's lives. Wasn't his world.

The girl working the counter at _Georgeso_ fish and chip shop could smell the stink of beer rolling off of Vinnie when he staggered in; shoving his poor boy in ahead of him like a battering ram. A boy whose hair had been cut into some god awful rat tail like approximation that the mother had once referred lovingly referred to as 'him lookin' just like a little crim'.

The boy had bruises, and dirt liberally anointed upon every bare patch of flesh what was visible to the naked eye. And that was quite a bit of exposed flesh to be certain. The weather was unseasonably warm, that was true, but the girl knew the family and had seen the boy wearing just as little now as he had been in the winter months; when snow had heaped heavy upon the pavement outside.

She would not call child protective services. Her family knew _his_ family. They were a large family, a dangerous family. One child in their possession still, the other three removed by social workers and residing with foster families. Those who had blown the whistle those three times prior had not known a moments peace. A teacher, a childcare worker, a 'concerned neighbour'. All had been threatened. One had been assaulted whilst perusing the tinned vegetable aisle at the local supermarket.

The girl at the counter wanted to do a lot more. She couldn't risk it. She had her own wellbeing to think about. Her own family. She felt for the boy and prayed fervently that someone in a much better position than herself would come along to help him.

She slipped an extra potato cake into the order, in the futile hope that it might go to the boy. She doubted it. His parents were selfish people. Rumour had it, that they had spent their child support money on paying their speeding fines and purchasing a brand new big screen television. The boy was, meanwhile, getting around in threadbare shoes; the soles of which had long since detached from the base and given way to tattered holes that let the wet and the cold in.

Vinnie made Jax hold the large, hot paper wrapped bundle outside of the store, whilst he lit a cigarette for himself. The heat proved too much for the poor boys small, tender hands and after a minute or two of pressing his little lips together so tight that the skin around them felt strained, he softly asked his father if he could set it down on the bench nearby. Just for a moment.

That's when Vinnie had struck him. A good old fashioned clip under the ear; precisely the likes of which he had himself been accustomed to growing up.

It was a harder hit than usual, likely because of all the beer Vinnie had been painstakingly force feeding himself for the better part of the day. Jax had stumbled, falling backward onto the concrete ramp and landing on his back. He started to cry and this impertinent response only angered Vinnie more. He went for him again, the back of his hand as much a threatening display as that of a frilled neck lizard distending the hood about its neck.

"Excuse me!" Came a voice from behind him. Gentle, lilting and yet somehow a tone what was firm enough to freeze Vinnie's hand in the strange salute it had formulated over his shoulder. "I wonder if I might be of some assistance here. I'm a social worker."

 _A fuckin' social worker..._ The words made Vinnie's blood boil. Nosy cunts never took a fuckin' night off, did they?

"Here. You mind your own fucking -" He turned, prepared to blast the intrusive little pansy prick into a state of pure pants soiling oblivion and trailed off.

Someone was standing there. Someone smiling, and slender and indistinguishable between male or female. They stood with one delicate hand poised upon the chipped, iron failing what framed the adjacent concrete ramp. Eyes sparkling with knowing, with patience and tolerance. Vinnie had always been a proper pussy grabber; never so much looked at another bloke and wanted more from him than the last pound in his pocket or whatever the hell else the fool might have been holding. In spite of this, he found himself now entirely and irrefutably undone; strung numb and dumb and gibbering in the face of something his crooked, feeble human mind had little hope of comprehending.

"Business?" The 'social worker' said, with a chuckle. "Would that I could! But, I'm sure you'll agree, not a great deal gets done when people persist with the notion of 'minding one's own business'." They drifted closer, like the bow of a ship cutting through the most temperate and still of waiting waters. Somehow cat like and at the same time elegant and airy. "Might I ask what dire misstep the boy must have taken to have earned your displeasure?"

Vinnie took in a sharp breath as the midday sun threw back the remaining shadows what clung to the front of the strangers body; illuminating their features with unequivocal clarity. Large, jersey cow eyes; of a colour you might see if you were to cut open a perfectly ripe Kent pumpkin and gaze upon the centre. Lashes that were long and thick lowered in temperate, almost measured blinks; never distracting nor subverting from the collection of their potent gaze. Skin burnished to a golden, honey coloured tan was as clear and as smooth as the surface of a milk bath. A mouth what might be considered a little too wide, was poised in a smile what was incapable of radiating warmth so much as temperately effusing its essence; such as a teabag whence clemently steeped into a waiting cup of hot water.

The 'social worker' was modestly clothed in a baggy jumper what hung from one shoulder, partway tucked into a pair of ripped denim jeans what terminated into the waiting grip of contrarily expensive looking black leather combat boots. Their long hair, the same shade as late harvest buckwheat was piled onto their head in a messy bun, from which carefree wisps saw fit to pilfer the boundaries what might have otherwise been imposed upon them and impart to horizons unknown.

Vinnie felt his legs go out from under him, and though such a thing could not reasonably have been expected outside of television sitcoms ostenisbly aimed at a lesser discerning demographic, he found himself on his knees before what might at a distance, been considered rather a more humble creature. They were not of a startling exotic beauty such as exemplified in the likes of the Kardashians and similarly lip plumped, curve personified reality stars of American television alike but there was a... something. Something exemplary and astonishing in each of its seemingly modest of parts. Something ageless and wondrous and... extraordinary.

It made no sense. They were a poof, nothing surer. Had to have been. Or one of those trannie people... trying to change their sex. Never made much sense to Vinnie. Make do with what God gave you, he'd always said, between each gulp of on special lager he had purchased that night from the bottle shop.

The thought of it made him sick to his stomach; all these perverted sicko's. Did it for attention, more the likely. That's what the current generation was like. Anything for a bit of attention. Instead of just toughing it out. Taking what you were handed. Couldn't understand it. Never _wanted_ to understand it.

Why then... why was he... crying?

"Hey... why are you kneeling, eh?" They were asking, those perfect tawny brows creased with empathy as they stepped closer. As they themselves crouched, Vinnie found himself, much to his shock, reaching out to clasp a hold of those very normal (extraordinary) hands and bringing them up to rest against his scarred, life addled cheek. A cheek what was dotted with the humiliating specks of tears what had not seen fit to present themselves for tens of a many years prior.

"I can't..." He sobbed, having no idea as to just what it was he could and could not do. The words that were coming from his mouth came from a deeper place. One he had lost touch with a long time ago. "I can't... stand in front of you..."

He reached up with one of his weathered, unworthy hands and set the palm to one of those perfect cheeks. He half expected for it to be slapped away, but the lovely creature simply smiled and placed their fingers against the backs of his own. Lent into the touch, as though they had loved him with a generosity and genuineness of which he himself had never known.

"You're so beautiful..." He whispered and felt more the ashamed in having permitted himself to be so flawed in his short and terrible life.

They continued to smile, though looked perfectly and delicately embarrassed by the praise. "I heard a rumour, yes. Apparently so. I don't know. Eye of the beholder, and all that." They chuckled softly. Humble and benign and... perfect. "Listen... do hate to be a bore, but I do have a duty of care. It simply wouldn't do if I were to turn my back on a situation such as this." They cast that beatific smile down towards the child. The child what had now curled himself up against the painted green of the store side bench; holding his cheek and swiping his small palms up under his welling eyes. "The boys bruises alone suggest that this is hardly the first time you have lent your hand to him. His eyes are haunted, and his cheeks are gaunt. Evidence enough that whatever care you provide for him is grossly inadequate." They petted their fingertips gently up beneath Vinnie's craggy jawline; the corners of their eyes softly creasing. "Your course must be corrected, for both your sakes."

Their fingers trailed down over Vinnie's chin, down towards his neck. The man was dumbstruck; enthralled, caught in a rictus from which he was unable to extract himself. Helpless, for when those fingers flared out from one another, formed a wicked claw and hooked about his neck.

"Piece of _shit."_ The beauteous creature spat. The luminous orange of their eyes flared from what had been a warm glow, to the threatening flare of an encroaching forest fire. "Selfish humans like you are the _worst._ Putting your own pitiful and pathetic existence before theirs; putting them at risk all for getting another needle in your veins, another slop of beer in your mouth, another cigarette between your lips!"

They took up the still smouldering cigarette that Vinnie had dropped. Held it so that its burning ember was poised but a bare inch from his bulging eye. He didn't so much as flinch; still too caught up in the trance under which his body had fallen.

"I should put this out; right in your goddamn eye! Serve you right, you know. Putting your hand on your child like that. Over and over again. Better'n what you deserve."

They seemed to think about it; taking very long and very deep breaths as they held the cigarette there. Grey, acrid smoke funnelled up and away from the tip. The heat of the ember was more the likely burning the outer layer of Vinnie's cornea as was. A moment passed, and then the social worker let out a groan of palpable disappointment and dropped the cigarette off to the side.

"Won't help though, will it? Maybe make me feel better for five minutes, but my feelings aren't what matter here. I'm not human after all." They leaned closer, exhaling softly from between their lips. A cool breeze passed over Vinnie's face, his expression literally frozen in place - sundered by a thin layer of ice. "Fortunately for you, I am also a virtue, not a vice. And though I am not patience, I am charitable with my time. Which is almost the same thing, really."

The Virtue took their hand from about the fool man's throat, placing it up beneath his chin instead. Vinnie's eyes could not move from behind the glaze of ice cast upon them, but they knew that he was watching them all the same.

"I have no children of my own," They said. "But I can't for the life of me understand how any parent could possibly contemplate, let alone actually hurt their kids! I mean; they're your _kids,_ dude!"

They gestured to Jax; frozen to the underside of the bench of his own accord.

"I see into your childs' soul, and I know him to be decent. An innocent who wishes only for his mother and father to love him. Who yearns for their approval, and who believes himself in some way deserving of the treatment you exact upon him." They slapped the palm of their hand against Vinnie's ice encrusted cheek. Leant closer so as to hiss their next words. "You are a foolish man, at risk of squandering the greatest gift what the Lord saw fit to bestow upon you. Fortunately," They stood, smiling and casting their arms out to either side of themselves in a meaningful gesture. "I am merciful. And whichever soul I can redirect from the path what leads to Hell is one less what must burn in the fires of her belly."

The creature pursed the pale pink of its lips, as though intending to whistle a cheery tune. Instead, a cool breath passed over Vinnie's catatonic features; easing through the bristles of crystalized ice what had formed between the delicate nodes of his once intoxicated mind. In that one breath alone, neural pathways were rewired, memories were modified, learned behaviours were unlearned. A rubicund nose, whats' tip appeared violently strained from the force of the blue veins pulsing beneath it, paled and thinned. Harsh lines in alcohol ravaged features were sanded down, crows feet smudged from existence and yellow stains seared from a tobacco ravaged mouth.

Where the husk of Vinnie Davies once knelt, there was instead a man who had never known the harshness of the existence what had once been his own reality. His were eyes that were clear and white and skin that was abraded only by the gentle stipulations of time. His body had been sluiced free of the drugs and the booze that had been more a part of him than his own natural blood supply. His mind was a stranger to acts of violence and anger.

The ice what held his face tenderly in the clasp of its healing touch, shattered into granules of glittering dust and drifted away. Vinnie's eyes moved ever so slightly from side to side. His expression was one of ever so mild confusion.

"From this moment forwards," So said the social worker, tapping their fingertip ever so slightly against the man's much improved nose. "You shall be the model father; a father whom others shall hold themselves up in comparison to. One who is admired, and respected for his decency, his commitment." They gestured towards the boy, still staring stock rigid beneath the benchtop. Uncertain as to what it was they were expected to be doing. "Every second of every day your prevalent and driving force shall be the happiness of your child. You will love, cherish and nurture them with every drop of energy at your reserve. You shall never again raise a hand to them; in anger or otherwise. You will protect them from harm, guide them down the path of righteousness and serve as the utmost and proper example of what a good and decent human being ought to be." They cupped their hand now beneath Vinnie's chin. Though their smile was as lovely and as endearing as before, there was a subtle edge to their eyes. One which unmistakably alluded to the power what resonated in the creature's core. "Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes." Vinnie replied, his own eyes somewhere distant. Still locked into some manner of trance that kept him quiet and complicit for as long as was required.

"Knew you had it in you!" The creature said, smiling warmly as they eased themselves upright and brushed down the front of their too large pullover. "Wait there a moment, won't you? Just need a word with your bonny wee ben."

They made their way towards the boy, drifting blithesomely along as though time were a construct entirely foreign in their world. The boy watched the strange person approach, and instinctively knew that there was nothing to be afraid of. They were surrounded by goodness and gentleness. They were a soft, pure and decent light; the likes of which the boy had only ever felt when staring out the car window, at the street lights.

The creature paused, cocked its head with a softly uttered 'Hrrm?' and then knelt down so as to retrieve the hot bag of fish and chips the boy had dropped. They let out a gasp after setting their hand atop the heat dampened surface of the paper.

"Did you order crabsticks?" They asked, looking far the more excited by the possibility than strictly necessary. The boy, uncertain, gave the smallest of nods; little more than a spasm of the chin. "Oh my God, crabsticks are the _best!_ Nice to know I'm not alone in the world!"

They glanced around, as though expecting to see a crowd of people prying over their shoulders and leaned closer as though to exclude this gaggling of unseen spectactors.

"You know, a lot of people say that the meat they put in crabsticks is actually something called seafood extender? Kind of like tripe, I think. I'm not sure I really care. Still tastes good to me. Don't you think?"

The boy, cheek still throbbing and lip still stinging found himself smiling in spite of it all. He nodded and the two of them chuckled together.

"What's your name?" The creature asked, setting the bag atop the bench. The boy was silent, still uncertain. "Has someone told you not to talk to strangers?" They asked and the boy gave a little nod. "That's good advice. Some of the time. Some strangers however, are people who can help." They gestured at the boys swollen cheek; his split lip what was quickly expanded to twice its normal size. "Did your daddy do that?"

The boy thought about whether to tell the truth or not. His family had always told him to keep what happened behind closed doors to himself. He was worried he would get in trouble if he told this strange adult the truth of what had happened. He might disappoint his father, make him angry. He might even have to sleep in the cupboard again.

The boy thought of all of this and then raised his head. The stranger was smiling down at him; the light from the sun casting a bright, otherworldly glow about the crown of their head. To the small, already far too damaged mind of this poor child, they looked far bigger and safer and stronger than anyone he had ever seen. They knew things no one else could ever possibly know.

They were safe.

The stranger raised their hand and passed it over the boys face. Their smile did not falter, not even as the wounds what Vinnie Davie's had bestowed upon his innocent son, found their mark upon the lip and cheekbone of the stranger themselves. The boys face, left clean and uninjured slackened into the countenance of a soft gasp and they raised one grubby hand to press to their now pain free features.

"Jesus, Mary, Joseph and all his other carpenter friends... he did hit you hard, didn't he?" The stranger winced, touching their thumb to the stinging wound on his lower lip. "You're a very brave boy."

"How did you do that?" The child asked. His wonderment cancelling out what precious little remained of his reservations.

"It's a gift." The stranger said. They reached out towards the boys ear, made a shiny pound appear from between their fingers. They held it up before the childs astonished features before then pressing it into their unexpecting palm and folding their fingers about it with a wink. "I like to give gifts."

"Like Santa?"

The stranger laughed, somewhat ironically. After all, they were the one who Jolly Old St Nich had been based on. "Yes, just like Santa! I used to have a beard like Santa's." They glanced their fingers nostalgically over their somewhat pointed and angular chin. "Not quite as white and as woolly, though."

"You're too skinny to be Santa." The boy observed, taking a closer look at the coin in his hand. As though expecting it to go ahead and disappear at any moment.

"Santa can't go on a diet? Santa's got to watch his waistline just like everyone else. Diabetes doesn't discriminate, young man."

"Jax." The boy said. "My name's... Jax."

"Nice to meet you, Jax." The stranger petted the palm of their hand against their chest. They never seemed to stop smiling, the boy noticed. He'd never seen anyone smile so much. "Most of your people call me Carmen Taylor. But _you,_ " They poked their finger towards him, almost playfully. "You can call me Caritas."

"That's a funny name."

"Not to point fingers, but someone with the name Jax shouldn't be... well, pointing fingers." Caritas chuckled, leaning over so as to set the palms of their hands gently to the boys upper arms. It was the slightest touch, but it was more reassuring and warm than any half-hearted hug that the boy had received in his so far short life. "You will be safe now, Jax. I promise you; your father will never hurt you again. And if there are other scary things you are going home to, your father will make sure that they don't hurt you any more either. You will be safe. No more pain."

"People promised stuff all the time." Jax mumbled, unconvinced. He continued turning the coin over in his hand, unable to accept that it was real. "People came to the house, and left. And then they'd just start socking me again. They said it would stop. It doesn't." They looked up at the creature called Caritas. Hope breathing light into the once dimmed countenance of his tired eyes. "Can I go with you instead?"

The creature looked humbled by the request. "My dear boy," they said, touching their fingertips to the curve of Jax's chin. "Holding onto me, is like holding onto a sheet of ice. I melt away, to places unseen and touch to all corners of the world."

They pinched their lips once more and billowed out another healing breath. The cool, transformative breeze wended its way inside of the boys mind. Reshaped the world that he had known.

"What I can give you," They said, "Is a mind is full of good memories and warm nights. The scar of the past is healed. You will be loved, until the moment you take your last breath." They petted his arm, seeing the transformation take root and handed him the now reasonably cooled bag of fish and chips. Another wave of their hand cleaned the grime from his skin, replaced the old tattered garments with those that were as new and as whole as his mind. "Go to your father now. Enjoy your lunch. Enjoy the days what lie ahead."

Jax and Vinnie blinked in perfect unison and glanced about as though waking from a dream. They paid no mind to Caritas, moving instead towards one another with a laugh and a smile. Vinnie set his hand to Jax's back and led him towards the car; a shiny, late model dual cab with naught but a speeding fine to its name. The loving father buckled his beloved son into the backseat; double checking to make sure that he was secure before returning to the front and pulling himself in behind the steering wheel. He took ample care in backing out into the traffic.

"However short those days may be." The Virtue of Charity murmured, wrapping the long sleeves of their jumper about their midsection and giving a pleased sigh for the good work they had done. They waited until the car had eased from sight, before making their own way towards the road. They continued towards their destination, a contented smile on their face and thumb extended in the eternal hope that someone else's charity may in fact prove a match for their own.

Belgravia was, after all, a long way on foot.

* * *

**~X~**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Hope you guys enjoyed the new chapter! Join me next time where Aziraphale and Crowley FINALLY get to talking about things, Caritas potentially makes it to London before the Apex occurs and the angels of Heaven notice something rather odd.  
> Comment if you like, or give that kudos button a kick in the human testicles! In the meantime, please stay safe everyone and remember that you can always touch base with me on twitter: @madammortis.
> 
> With all my infernal love,  
> ~MadamMortis~xxx ooo


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